Our Vision

Being the first iGEM team from Finland and one of the few groups in Finland actually doing synthetic biology, our goal was to make people aware of the field and its possibilities.

The first part was figuring out how to explain any of it to an audience that isn't that familiar with biology or gene technology. Explaining BioBricks as LEGO bricks and synthetic biology through programming and engineering helped. But our major breakthrough was the invention of Brian in July and the concept of turning bacteria into superheroes. That really resonated with people and it seemed like people started understand what we actually did.

The other part was informing students and researchers in related fields about synthetic biology and iGEM. There's a lot of people with knowledge of gene technology and biotech in Finland, but synthetic biology is hardly mentioned. We aimed to change that, though a major part of that will be recruiting next year's team.

We also took part in the Summer of Startups startup incubator. It was a great platform for learning to talk about synthetic biology in layman's terms.

We also learned what it means to be a synthetic biology startup and we want spread that information onwards to people who are interested in trying that out.

Media

A Website for the General Public

At the very beginning of the project we wanted to create a website that we could link to our friends, new acquaintances and potential sponsors. It included basic info about us and a general overview of the project. We started developing it rapidly and it actually got into a presentable shape fairly fast.

We expected to attract sponsors with the page, but the most important function turned about to be for media to use as a basis for a story and for our Facebook fans to get a more in-depth introduction to us. It was also really good practice for making the wiki. Using GitHub together with several people was a new experience and sometimes it was difficult to find out why things weren't working how we thought they should work.

This is how the first plan of the "sponsor website" looked like. We developed it further during the project. It might be still available at http://www.aaltohelsinki.com/.

Creating the Wiki

Making a good wiki was an important thing for us. It had to be simple, well formatted but also nice to look at and informative. We wanted it to represent our team well. We wanted to take our time with it and develop it with care. So, we started early and proceeded to create our wiki steadily, step by step. It turned out amazingly well. It's completely responsive so it looks good on any platform: phones, pads, desktops. We also hope that you can effortlessly find everything you'd want to, and that scrolling through the content is a pleasent experience for every visitor.

Figuring out the best way to present ourselves in the wiki was a tough problem to solve. We thought about many options but ended up having a little similar layout that we had used in the practice website. Having a sidebar seemed like a fun idea at first but we gave it up to keep things aesthetically pleasing and to make it possible to browse the wiki on all platforms. Scrolling through the content felt like a great choice, so instead of countless different subcategories, we only have eight categories and you can just scroll through them. Sorting the categories felt very difficult, too, but in the end it feels like everything found their own place.

The first thing we did for making the wiki was an upload tool: iGEM Wiki Quickifier. With it we could upload content to a our team wiki without using the cumbersome wiki interface. We could write our pages as html files and the script would add the needed template tags as it uploaded the pages to the wiki. Uploading content to other wikis than ours is not implemented (yet), but if you know python, modifying the script should be an easy task.

We used GitHub to keep our texts syncronized so you can also browse the work process from our commit history. Here's the GitHub page of our wiki. You can, of course, also browse the code that's here on the final version of the wiki.

We made the wiki from scratch: we didn't use any templates but we designed and constructed the wiki ourselves. We utilized Bootstrap and JQuery libraries to ease the mission a bit but the layout and the code is our work.

Social Media

Our own website, blog, Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, Flickr. Links.

Events and Meetings

eksperttimiitti alussa, SoS Meetings, Lab Tours. Edustus esim. Aalto Party, mole-HOPS puhuminen, VTT-esitys, HYBER, Heureka

Finding Partners

Finding the right people and teaching them what iGEM means.

The Extras

Flappy Coli

We also made a silly game (an iGEMified version of Flappy Bird) called Flappy Coli. In the game you are guiding a genetically modified bacterium through an iGEM maze. The flagellum of the bacterium will grow as you get further in the game, and if you get far enough, it might even grow more flagella!

The game was created with the help of a guide by http://www.lessmilk.com/ ("How to make a Flappy Bird in HTML5").

All of the code is available on the GitHub page of Flappy Coli.

Here's the bacterium navigating through the iGEM maze.

Cellf Improvement

We got so inspired by the iGEM summer project that the bacterial thoughts created another game idea in our heads. Lassi, Laura and Jimi started building a game about being a bacterium in a vast petri dish, exploring a weird world and gaining plasmids to become the biggest, baddest... thing in the gene pool.

In the game, the player controls a "bacterium" that is composed of a bunch of cells. The goal of the bacterium is to wander around a vast biological world, collect plasmids, meet different creatures and evolve. The bacterium gains features as it consumes plasmids and loses them when it throws plasmids away. The bacteria might even launch their worst plasmids at each other!

Although the game is inspired by the mechanisms of real bacteria, we took some artistic liberties in applying them.

Chimeras

In mythology, chimera is a monstrous creature with parts from multiple animals. In science, the word chimera is used to refer to an organism or a virus which has genetically distinct cells from two (or more) different zygotes or genetic material from other organisms. Also fusion proteins can be called chimeras.

Studying the connection between the different definitions for the word "chimera", we came up with the idea to draw a chimera for every team member. To make things interesting, everyone got to decide three different animals. Laura drew each of them during the summer. Here they are all assembled.

The caption under the image tells which chimera belongs to which team member (and which animals each chimera contains).

• Lassi: aye-aye, hedgehog, squirrel
• Laura: snow leopard, dragonfly, least weasel
• Martina: tortoise, koala, moose
• Mikko: hammerhead shark, anaconda, tarantula
• Minttu: unicorn, raccoon, leopard
• Niklas: lion, fox, crow
• Oskari: hummingbird, giraffe, peacock
• Otto: salmon, snake, eagle
• Pietu: polar bear, kangaroo, hedgehog