Thanks!

Thanks everyone for the support and congratulations! We and Dr. Coli very much appreciate your sympathy

After the awards ceremony on Sunday (all results are here), we enjoyed the last iGEM chats (and model and wiki compliments ) and then set out to explore what was outside MIT’s Stata Center. Harvard yard, the Boston Freedom Trail, the Aquarium, the lonely lobsters (check the pictures!) and the obligatory stop at the MIT Coop for some hoodies and other MIT goodies.

On Monday, the “old” ones said goodbye to their favorite “Team Sympathiek” and returned home, while the students set off to NY for a well deserved holiday.

See you next year!

(PS the mysterious camera team was from Jim Lehrer’s News Week and MTV Latin America!)

And the winner is…

The award ceremony is over. First the bronze medals were announced, but no KULeuven there. Drew Endy went on with the silver medals, but still nothing for us. Our hearts started to tick even faster as the gold medal winners were to be announced… It was everything or nothing! At last the verdict came, and there we were! Among the 16 gold medal winners, the KULeuven appeared on the big screen! Yes, we did!

Award hystery!

Waiting for the judges and turning Kresge auditorium upside down…

Not a finalist, but…

Meagan announced the 6 finalists in alphabetical order in front of a cheering crowd. Berkeley Wetware, Caltech, Freiburg, Harvard, K…? But then followed NYMU Taipei and Slovenia…. As eager competitors we were of course disappointed, but: our congratulations to the finalists! And didn’t we learn never to believe spreading rumours? Well, new chances today as in the morning the 6 finalists will give their presentation again and by noon, also all other prizes will be announced. Fingers crossed!

Dr. Coli big success at the poster session

Dr. Coli’s poster turned out to be a blockbuster at the iGEM 2008 Jamboree. Judges, iGEM colleagues and Randy Rettberg (!) were smoothly walked through. Also the KULeuven team made a tour of the posters to ask some tricky questions.

K.U.Leuven meets TUDelft and Groningen

After presentations, we met Janine Kiers from TUDelft and gave some K.U.Leuven folders to the Groningen team. Janine congratulated us with our nice performance and we discussed how our teams experienced iGEM this year. In short: iGEM rulez!

Pressure’s building

In 30 minutes, finalists will be announced…

Rumours are spreading…

To be continued!

MathWorks impressed by Dr. Coli

While still enjoying our presentation prestation during the coffee break, we saw Kristen Zannella (Biotech & Pharmaceutical Industry Manager of The Mathworks) inspecting and taking pictures of our Dr. Coli poster. She was really impressed by our modeling results and excited to see us use the Simbiology toolbox of Matlab to model and simulate our model. Also our sensitivity analysis approach made an impression on her. She also gave away we are the only team beside the Mexican team to really use the toolbox the way the R&D team has developed it. Bonus for us

20 liters of sweat paid off

Yes, mission accomplished! Stefanie, Benjamien, Hanne and Jonas did a great job defending the team’s and the K.U.Leuven’s colours in front of a full MIT D463 auditorium at iGEM 2008. The jury however seemed a little bit overwhelmed by Dr. Coli’s assets. Questions on the GFP and input/output characterization were professionally answered by Nathalie, but let’s hope the lack of simulation questions does not mean iGEM did not see our modeling qualities! Maybe the camera team that recorded our presentation and left right after it is a good sign as they were only spotted before at the impressive BactoKidney project (or did you send them, Bart? . So, fingers crossed, since tonight at 8.30 the 6 iGEM 2008 finalists are announced! To be continued…