IBE participates in the Barcelona International Youth Science Challenge (BIYSC), an international excellence programme coordinated by Catalunya-La Pedrera Foundation that aims to stimulate scientific talent among young people from all over the world, and to encourage their enthusiasm for pursuing scientific research and careers in science.

From 2016 to 2018, the IBE participated with the project "Uncovering the hidden diversity of the oceans" in the framework of the Barcelona International Youth Science Challenge (BIYSC) of the Catalunya-La Pedrera Foundation.

Scientists at the IBE often receive samples from all over the world containing potential new species. In this case they had received a new specimen from the Arctic Ocean, which was isolated from the digestive tract of the filter feeding mussel in a group of islands of Canada. The main goal of this project was to characterize this unknown marine microorganism by using fluorescence microscopy imaging in parallel to molecular biology techniques and computational biology tools. The students learned how to culture, describe and analyze in an evolutionary context a new lineage.

Several Catalan research centers participate in BIYSC hosting students from all over the world.

You can find more pictures of the project in the Facebook photo album.