Six Oxford University researchers will receive part of a grant which totals around £650m across almost 500 young scientists.

The European Research Council, the premier European funding organisation for frontier research, has announced the awarding of 494 major European Research Council (ERC) Starting Grants.

The grant is given to young scientists and scholars across Europe, totalling nearly €780 million this year.

The funding is part of the Horizon Europe programme and will support researchers at the beginning of their careers to launch their own projects, form their teams, and pursue their most promising ideas.

The application process for ERC Starting Grants is highly competitive with around only 14 per cent of applications being successful, with 494 researchers selected out of 3,474 proposals.

Each of the Oxford researchers selected for a starting grant will receive up to €1.5 million for a period of five years.

The winners include associate professor Christian Coester, Dr Federica Gigante, Dr Georgia Isom, Dr Clémence Ligneul, Associate Professor Berta Verd, and Dr Antoni Wrobel.

Iliana Ivanova, Commissioner for Innovation, Research, Culture, Education and Youth, said: "The European Commission is proud to support the curiosity and passion of our early-career talent under our Horizon Europe programme.

"The new ERC Starting Grants winners aim to deepen our understanding of the world. Their creativity is vital to finding solutions to some of the most pressing societal challenges."

Associate professor Coester’s, in the department of computer science, work addresses questions at the forefront of theoretical computer science, both in classical algorithm paradigms as well as how machine learning can be leveraged to improve algorithms.

Dr Gigante, of the faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies and the Khalili Research Centre, will focus on the role of slavery in the transmission of things and knowledge from the Islamic world to Europe in the late 16th and 17th centuries.

Dr Isom, from the Sir William Dunn School of Pathology, will focus on the research combining structural biology, biochemistry, and microbiology to study the molecular mechanisms by which bacteria build the cell envelope and protect themselves against antibiotics.

Dr Ligneul, from the Nuffield Department of Clinical Neurosciences, will focus on methods to non-invasively image the microstructural properties of the brain.

Using her ERC Starting Grant, Associate Professor Berta Verd, from the department of biology, aims to explore how developmental processes have evolved to generate diversity in the number of vertebrae, a highly variable trait amongst vertebrates which ranges from as few as ten in some frogs to several hundred in snakes.

While, Dr Wrobel, from the department of biochemistry, will focus her project on the structure and evolution of viral glycoproteins, the molecules which bind to receptors on cell surfaces to enable a virus to enter a host.