Perfecting everything and admiring our wiki which is totally done at this point. All's well, we can just relax before the Jamboree.

We plan to go to an escape the room thing, but when all the suitable times are booked, Minttu takes us bowling instead.

We go visit the observatorium during the Night of the Arts event in Helsinki. There's also massive soap bubbles and a man with a whole band setup in a baby carriage.

The next day we go back to playing pinball and Crash Team Racing because it was so much fun last week.

We meet the event manager and event organizer of Heureka and come up with a synthetic biology weekend workshop we could organize in Spring.

They were very excited about us and everything we had to show and tell. They said that this is a perfect match from them and all the simulations, games, pictures fit perfectly into the workshop.

We hope to inspire young people to study synthetic biology in the future and let the older people know it exists. This will also be a perfect opportunity for the next year's iGEM Team to get involved and organize something together.

Lassi takes us to play pinball. It's surprisingly fun. We also play a ton of Crash Team Racing.

We meet with The Academy of Finland's Center of Excellence HYBER 2014-2019. They want us to talk in their conference and support us.

In the evening Oskari takes us to play laser tag! He is way better than anyone else.

Instead of staying in our HQ and eating in the cafeteria next to it, Laura takes us to eat fancy sushi. It's delicious and fun.

Img of sushi.

We build the sequences to synthetize from scratch. They include the OR lambda repressor sites we designed. The synthetisizing is the same price for 0-1000 nucleotides, so we include a few surrounding BioBricks to save on lab time.

We meet Tania, an ex-iGEMer from the one 2012 Amsterdam team. It's a great meeting and we finally get some validation that we're doing some things right.

In the evening Martina takes us geocaching! It is pretty exiting.

We present our idea to hundreds of people and hold a booth for 6 hours.

We have the lambda repressor figured out and integrated into our system. We start planning for the parts to be synthesized.

In the evening Mikko takes us to watch The Skin I Live In, Scott Pilgrim vs. The World and The Grand Budapest Hotel.

Summer of Startups takes us to visit the Startup people of Tallinn. We decide this is a practice trip for Boston, so we planned to have as much fun as possible. It was a great success.

We find out that the lambda repressor system would be perfect for our three-way switch idea. We figure out how it works and how to include it in our gene circuit.

We decided that we should do something fun every week as a group that has nothing to do with iGEM. Every team member has their own week. Starting now.

So Otto surprised us with a fruit juicer and a ton of fresh fruit. We spent the early morning happily drinking smoothies.

Because chimera is a term in gene techonology and mythology, Laura decided that drawing a chimera for each member based on the animals they choose would be a cool idea.

We agreed. Here's Otto.

We get the idea of explaining synthetic biology as turning bacteria into superheroes from a meeting with ???. We start working on a new pitch based on that.

Pietu finishes the pitch the next day and presents it at Summer of Startups. It seems to go over very well. People finally understand what we are doing.

It has been on the help page for a while. We only noticed it now.

We also wrote a thing for the Community page and got them featured on there.

Also new pictures. Like a new group photo.

Tons of mentions on Twitter. People seem to like it a lot.

Try it out!

It started from the mild inconvenience of searching for BioBricks in the lab. It ended being used on 5 continents.

Check it out! This time it does actually look cool!

We meet a few times to go over what we will say to the Summer of Startups panel, so that they will accept us to the program.

This culminates on the 28th, when we have the interview. Our team leader tries to attend through Skype, but the panel doesn't like it. We manage to pull through anyway and the panel is very excited about us at the end.

We get in.

We presented ourselves and our initial ideas to a panel of experts, mostly researchers from VTT and some from the Viikki biocampus.

They received us very well and there was a lot of interesting discussion. We also noticed that we can pretty cool things as a group.

We presented our initial ideas to our advisor, Markus, in preparation for the expert meet. We discussed what direction to go and what kind of idea to pick.

We made an introduction video of us so we could apply to Summer of Startups. It turned out pretty good! Video link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LJX21WthZQg.

The first version of our website was built. We wanted it to look cool. It didn't.

Some brainstorming. Wild ideas. Rating the ideas. Post-it gradient.

The first team meeting was held on a Friday afternoon. Some of us met each other for the first time ever, some had met before already. We talked about the project and got to know each other.

Oskari is in the first job interview in his life, as the interviewer. He holds 19 more interviews during the week. Nine are chosen to be in the final team.

It seems like the universities are into the idea.

First e-mails are sent