FHERITALE

This proposal systematically addresses the development, provision, and integration of services, across the European Research Infrastructures (RIs) landscape, that the scientific community can use to investigate the effects on health and the environment that artificial materials (including plastics, micro-, nano-, and biotechnological materials) can have. Exposure to such materials may occur as a result of their intended use (e.g., food packaging) or at the end of their lifecycle (e.g. plastic wear). These services, which are relevant to several areas of important societal and economic impact, are expected to span multiple scales and disciplines, including high-quality metrology, structural biology, microbiology, and ecotoxicology. The main output of this proposal will be a thorough overview of extant service offer by European RIs with respect to questions from state-of-the-art of scientific research in the aforementioned domains. FHERITALE will identify common strategies for the coordination and optimization of services at different RIs geared towards increasing the accessibility of relevant technologies. In parallel, it will identifty those service and technology gaps that are hampering high-impact research and preventing a timely assessment of the repercussions of new materials on health and the environment. These gaps constitute high-priority areas for future development. FHERITALE will design a coordination framework for the RIs to drive these key technological developments. The technological focus of this application includes emerging areas of research for which international interest is rapidly growing. The interdisciplinary nature of the cluster of identified technologies will connect health, food, and environment research, constituting one of the first examples of practical application of the “One Health” approach. This coordination effort will also serve as a fertile ground for further interdisciplinary research among RIs from the H&F and other domains.