EU 4DN activities
provided by Ana Pombo:
One formal initiative (https://www.4dnucleome.eu/) was directly linked with country-wide coordinated lobbying for top level EU funding. 4DN-EU scored well in the first round, but we were asked to merge with another group, with a strong focus on single cell studies. The joint EU Flagship consortium is called LifeTime (https://lifetime-fetflagship.eu/), co-led by MDC with Curie (N. Rajewsky and Genevieve Almouzni). If funded we will get 1-yr top level funding to create the initiatives that would become priority funding schemes from 2020.
The https://www.4dnucleome.eu/ initiative was originally led by Marc Marti-Renom from Spain, and various of us from other countries, but at the time of the fusion for the Lifetime Flagship, it was decided that Genevieve Almouzni would represent the 4DN community. Of note, there is no EU-wide funded program for the purpose, as far as I know.
There was also in parallel a different group of scientists with motivation to create an European-wide 4DN initiative. These initiatives mostly entailed scientific conferences, I believe one in Mainz, Germany, and another in Krakow, Poland.
More locally, in Germany, Stefan Mundlos, Argyris Papantonis, Eileen Furlong and I, co-coordinate an DFG Priority Program SPP2202, on “Spatial genome architecture in development and disease”, which is currently receiving applications. The focus is on mechanisms, disease and development, novel technologies and data integration. We don’t yet have a website, nor the final membership (~20 groups), but the call can be found here: http://www.dfg.de/foerderung/info_wissenschaft/info_wissenschaft_18_25/index.html. Funded projects will be decided early in 2019.