Flights from Helsinki to Boston on 27th October. A full week in Boston. Presenting our project in front of thousands of people.

Perfecting everything and admiring our work. All is well and we can just relax before the Jamboree.

A presentation for HYBER Workshop in Långvik; great practice for the Giant Jamboree!

Even though we had started developing the wiki early, the freeze deadline somehow snuck up on us. So little time, so many things to do. And finishing the wiki wasn't even the only thing we had to do before going to Boston!

Getting ready for the Giant Jamboree!

Out of nowhere we were invited to do an interview for the national radio YLE! We talked about our project and showed the interviewer around our lab.

We held a presentation about our project at VTT. It was the first time we presented ourselves to a real scienctific audience and we got some really good feedback from the researchers.

We participated in an event called Pitch Night and Oskari gave an inspiring speech about following dreams and introduced our project to the audience which mostly consisted of middle-aged people. Pitch Night was part of the Thinkfest arranged by University of Helsinki in celebration of the university's 375th anniversary.

To kick off the academic year, Aalto University hosts a party every year during the first week of school. Despite the name, it's not really a party but more of an exhibition to show all the cool stuff the university has to offer. Of course, we were there to represent our team and to tell people about iGEM and our project.

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

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

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

We met the event manager and event organizer of Heureka and came 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 for 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 took us to play pinball. It was surprisingly fun. We played a ton of Crash Team Racing too.

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

In the evening Oskari took us to play laser tag! He was way better at it than anyone else.

Marko Ahtisaari and Madeleine Abromowitz from MIT Media Lab came to visit our office and lab. We discussed about a possible pop-up media lab in Helsinki and threw some ideas in the air. We were also invited to go visit the actual MIT Media Lab in Boston when we go there for the Giant Jamboree.

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

We built the sequences to synthetize from scratch. They included the lambda repressor O_R sites that we designed. We found out that the synthetisizing costs the same for 0-1000 nucleotides, so we include a few surrounding BioBricks to save on lab time. (The O_R sites are fairly small.)

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

In the evening Martina took us geocaching! It is amazing what can be hidden in completely plain sight.

We presented our idea to hundreds of people and held a booth for 6 hours.

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

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

Summer of Startups took us to visit the Startup people of Tallinn. We decided this was a practice trip for Boston, so we planned to have as much fun as possible. It was a great success and an unforgettable experience.

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

We decided that as a group we should do something fun every week that has nothing to do with iGEM. Every team member had their own week to plan an activity and pull the team to the mandatory weekly having-fun moment.

So, Otto surprised us with a fruit juicer and a ton of fresh fruit. We spent the early morning happily drinking smoothies while working intensely on our project.

Because chimera is a term both in gene techonology and mythology, Laura decided (and others immediately agreed) that drawing a chimera for each member would be a cool idea. Everyone could decide three animals and a chimera would be drawn based on those.

To read more about the chimeras, head to "chimeras" section on the Outreach page.

We got the idea of explaining synthetic biology as turning bacteria into superheroes from a meeting with Micki Honkavaara. We started working on a new pitch based on that.

Pietu finished the pitch the next day and presented it at Summer of Startups. It seemed to go over very well. People finally understood what we were doing.

Our BioBrick Seeker had been mentioned on the official help page for a while. We only noticed it now.

We also wrote a small advertisement text for the Community page and got the Seekers featured there.

BioBrick Seeker received attention on Twitter. People really seemed to like the tool.

We were trying to advertise ourselves and get some kind of financial help and support for this project. It felt really difficult and time consuming. We also took some new pictures, a new group photo, for example.

It started from the mild inconvenience of searching for BioBricks in the lab. Now we could search through this year's distribution effortlessly. Because it was so useful for us, we decided to share it to others, too.

This time it did actually look cool! The actual website might still be available on http://2014.aaltohelsinki.com/: check it out!

We met a few times to go over what we would say to the Summer of Startups panel, so that they would accept us to the program. This culminated on the 28th, when we had the interview. Our team leader tried to attend through Skype, but the panel didn't like it. We managed to pull through anyway, and the panel was very excited about us at the end.

They accepted us in the program.

We presented ourselves and our initial ideas to a panel of experts, mostly researchers from VTT and the Viikki biocampus. The occasion went very well and there was a lot of interesting discussion. We noticed that we really can do cool things as a group.

We presented our initial ideas to our advisor, Markus, in preparation for the expert meeting. We discussed what direction to go and what kind of an 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. Then an unbelievably cool post-it gradient of all the ideas.

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 was in the first job interview in his life, as the interviewer. He held 19 more interviews during the week. Nine people were chosen to be in the final team.

It seemed like the universities were into the idea.

First e-mails about the idea were sent.