Team:KU Leuven/Journal

This summer, three dedicated male engineers spent a whole summer modelling our systems.
However, without the help of a girl, Tina, this would have been a rather "nerdy" journal. Luckily, Tina was always there when the modelling team sought a balance between awful jokes and work efficiency. Nevertheless, without Sander's work tempo, Bert’s criticism and Tomas' factotum mind, the modelling would not have been as thorough as now.
In this journal, you can read how they started modelling from scratch up to being modelling specialists, using Matlab, SimBiology, COBRA and even qPCR.

We worked together with two research groups, Biobest and pcfruit. Both offer a whole series of parasitoids and predators against aphids for the purpose of biological pest control and investigate the relationship between plant and aphid in search of a method to protect plants from this pest. Here, you can read more about the experiments Aurelie and Flore (Biobest) and Tina and Tomas (pcfruit) performed to test our model on aphids and ladybugs.

Here we present the work on the EBF-biobrick, a part of the glucose model, week by week. The contributors are Lukas and Su, which formed a very tight team that already started with lab work even during the exams in June. Lukas’ multitasking skills and Su’s precise work, combined with their cute smiles, made sure everyone regretted not being part of this team.
You can read all about the extensive work the EBF guys have done in this part.

Long team discussions and Bert’s persistence resulted this summer in a ‘proof of concept’ wetlab version of Bert Mortier’s oscillator, called the ‘feed forward loop’.
Pieter and Sylvie were immediately up to form a subteam and started working in order to create a part of the oscillator.
In this part, you can read all about their big UP in the beginning, going to a down after a while and the eventual steady state with troubleshooting in the end.
Nevertheless, this feed forward loop is only the beginning to create Bert’s oscillator.

The Methyl Salicylate team or ‘MeS boys’, in normal life called Robbert and Laurens, worked on the improvement of the methyl salicylate brick round the clock almost whole summer. The journal can be found here. More information on the MeS biobrick can be found on this page.

The modelling team also performed a qPCR, a new and appeasing way to characterise and to find data for our computer model. In this part, you can read how to properly manage with troubles and how to search for promising directions.