What? Many places use place branding to attract residents and tourists. Residents vary from those who were born and have lived in the same place all their life, and translocal ones - with connection to multiple places. The project explores the engagement with branding campaign of 'translocal' residents – those who have bonds with multiple locations, and contrasts it to the responses of locals. Why? Success of place branding often rests on residents' support. But how do residents, especially those who feel connected to multiple places, react to such branding campaigns? Place attachment has been suggested as a driver of engagement with place branding campaigns, but past work only looked at locals with a single place attachment, not acknowledging the role multiple place attachment can play. How? The project uses qualitative methodology - photos and interviews - for a case study of Girona, Spain. Different groups of local and translocal residents will be asked to provide pictures of places they feel attached to. Followingly, the pictures will be used to ask for their stories of these places - about their attachment to them, and their reactions to place branding campaigns of Girona.

Selective functionalization of C-H bonds in hydrocarbons is a grand challenge that chemists have tried to address for decades drawing inspiration from enzymatic oxidation reactions, with limited success. The mimicry of metalloenzymes has typically focused on the metal center, overlooking crucial aspects of the enzymatic machinery: secondary coordination effects, molecular recognition, and confinement within the isolated active site of the protein. Herein, well-established coordination manifolds for Fe- and Mn-based oxidation of C-H bonds will be melded to a synthetic molecular receptor. The novelty of the resulting metallo-cavitand receptors lies in the positioning of the reactive metal center in close proximity to a binding pocket with robust molecular recognition features. The proposed reactions will exploit a structured microenvironment based on carefully designed non-covalent interactions. The designed hosts will bind hydrocarbons and related substrates in a confined space in close proximity to a reactive metal species, promoting site-selective oxidation dictated by the orientation of the substrate within the receptor rather than by the innate reactivity of the different C-H bonds in the structure. ConfiMet will deliver unprecedented site-selective functionalization reactions in molecules with multiple chemically equivalent C-H bonds, of important impact in the development of sustainable production methods for drugs and other chemical specialties. This project is a unique opportunity for the researcher to combine existing skills in coordination chemistry and transition metal catalysis with supramolecular chemistry concepts. The stimulating environment provided by the Institute of Computational and Catalysis, a research unit of excellence at Universitat de Girona (Spain), will allow the candidate to develop leadership, communication, and independent thinking skills, enhancing her career prospects in the transition to an independent academic position.

In developed countries, modern lifestyle often leads women to postpone their decision on when to have children. By 2022, the average age at which women in Europe give birth to their first child had crossed 30. Unfortunately, delayed motherhood is associated with a decline in women's reproductive potential, which can manifest as difficulties with conception, miscarriages, or an increased risk of delivering a child with chromosomal abnormalities. This decline is primarily attributed to the fact that oocytes, the reproductive cells, gradually lose their quality and fertilization potential with age. The primary object of the FRASP (Female Reproductive Ageing - Signalling Pathways) Proposal is to gain insights into why oocytes lose their reproductive capacity as women age. Recently, several signalling pathways have been identified to be involved in the aging of oocytes and the cumulus cells that directly surround and interact with them. However, our current understanding remains limited, and this knowledge may not have an immediate impact in the near future. This Proposal aims to comprehensively analyse the signalling pathways responsible for aging in oocytes and cumulus cells derived from mice. To achieve this, we will employ a range of high-throughput techniques comprising for multiOMICS approach. Signalling pathways will be investigated at the RNA, protein, and metabolite levels. Additionally, we will explore how these pathways influence the outcome of fertilisation. We believe that our approach will provide a profound understanding of the intricate molecular mechanisms that occur during oocyte aging, ultimately offering potential molecular targets for therapeutic interventions.

Natural enzymes have evolved to perform their functions under complex selective pressures, being capable of accelerating reactions by several orders of magnitude. In particular, heteromeric enzyme complexes catalyze an enormous array of useful reactions that are often allosterically regulated by different protein partners. Unfortunately, the underlying physical principles of this regulation are still under debate, which makes the alteration of enzyme structure towards useful isolated subunits a tremendous challenge for modern chemical biology. Exploitation of isolated enzyme subunits, however, is advantageous for biosynthetic applications as it reduces the metabolic stress on the host cell and greatly simplifies efforts to engineer specific properties of the enzyme. Current approaches to alter natural enzyme complexes are based on the evaluation of thousands of variants, which make them economically unviable and the resulting catalytic efficiencies lag far behind their natural counterparts. The revolutionary nature of EnzVolNet relies on the application of conformational network models (e.g Markov State Models) to extract the essential functional protein dynamics and key conformational states, reducing the complexity of the enzyme design paradigm and completely reformulating previous computational design approaches. Initial mutations are extracted from costly random mutagenesis experiments and chemoinformatic tools are used to identify beneficial mutations leading to more proficient enzymes. This new strategy will be applied to develop stand-alone enzymes from heteromeric protein complexes, with advantageous biosynthetic properties and improve activity and substrate scope. Experimental evaluation of our computational predictions will finally elucidate the potential of the present approach for mimicking Nature’s rules of evolution.