These four initiatives, totaling approximately 6 million euros for the CSIC, will focus on creating a genomic atlas for rare diseases, developing new precision cosmology, studying hybrid glasses, and applying quantum computing to the study of matter.
Researcher Antoni Beltran, from the Institute of Biomedicine of Valencia (IBV), will lead a project to create an experimental genomic atlas studying how mutations alter protein stability, contributing to the understanding of rare diseases. "Our project will use technology that allows us to measure the effect of hundreds of thousands of mutations simultaneously in the lab," explains Beltran, who assures that all generated data will be open and free.
Meanwhile, Celia Castillo, from the Institute of Materials Science of Madrid (ICMM), will investigate the internal workings of hybrid materials to design a new generation of custom-designed glasses with uses ranging from blocking ultraviolet radiation to capturing gases. "My goal is to understand what causes certain hybrid materials, like MOFs, to melt and transform into a new class of glass," she notes.
The project by Marco Gatti, from the Institute of Space Sciences (ICE), proposes a new approach to precision cosmology using thousands of simulated universes to combine measurements from telescopes such as Euclid, the South Pole Telescope, and Planck. The aim is to answer major unresolved questions in cosmology and obtain a more complete picture of matter and gas throughout cosmic time.
Finally, Daniel González-Cuadra, from the Institute of Theoretical Physics (IFT), will develop new ways to use quantum computing to study systems formed by fermions, the particles that constitute the matter around us. "It's not enough to build larger quantum computers: we need new ways to program them," indicates the researcher, whose project aims to tackle problems currently beyond the reach of classical computation.
