International delegates are set to attend the fourth annual Bermuda Principles Foundation Conference, with this year’s event focused on transcriptomics.

Bermuda Institute of Ocean Sciences [BIOS] microbiologist and doctoral candidate Rachel Parsons Biggs has been seconded to Helix Bermuda where she is one of the many people helping the island in the fight against Covid-19.

In the U.S. alone, approximately 40 million people receive Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) exams each year. These procedures use computer-generated radio waves and strong magnets to create detailed 3-D pictures of areas inside the human body, helping doctors diagnose a variety of conditions, such as blood clots, bone infections, or compressed discs in the spine.

While some students begin high school with solid career goals in mind, others are trying to identify their interests and align them with potential academic majors or occupations. The BIOS Ocean Science Camp (OSC) was created in 2018 to help engage and support this latter group of students. OSC is a snorkel-based summer camp geared toward students between the ages of 12 and 15 who are interested in the ocean, but may not have had previous opportunities to study marine science.

The Bermuda Program, part of BIOS’s Ocean Academy suite of local education programs, has been providing internship opportunities to Bermudian students, aged 18 and older, since 1976. In that time, more than 250 summer internship placements have been provided to young Bermudians. The program pairs students with BIOS faculty and scientific staff, who serve as mentors for participants while they conduct research projects in the fields of marine and atmospheric science.

Molecular biologist Julius Barsi hosted three student interns from Bermuda, Canada, and the Netherlands this summer for an introduction to systems biology. Their research, on purple sea urchin embryos, focused on differential gene expression analysis, the mechanism by which cells become specialized to conduct a specific “job” for the organism.

Since arriving at BIOS in July 2019, scientist Julius Barsi’s first priority has been designing a facility dedicated to a unique type of molecular biology to be built at BIOS within an existing laboratory space. The transgenic facility, which will be located in the Naess Building on campus, will leverage marine organisms to discover specifically how genes are controlled.

Julius Christopher Barsi grew up in a family of academics, engineers, and artists, including grandparents who owned an estate farm in Kona, Hawaii. Being surrounded by such natural wild beauty, he knew from an early age that he wanted to become a biologist. By his teenage years he was fascinated by a diverse array of topics, including nuclear physics and genetics. Realizing the importance that the discovery of the double helix (the twisted-ladder structure of a DNA molecule) held for the field of life sciences, he decided to dedicate his academic career to the pursuit of knowledge in this area.