Team:KU Leuven/Notebook

Today, everyone finally finished their exams, and we decided to get to work immediately so we held a kick-off meeting, so we had our noses all in the same direction.

It is always necessary to get feedback from important players in the field, in order to get relevant feedback on your project. With that thought in mind we contacted Biobest.
Biobest is a Belgian company which exports bumblebees to over 50 countries worldwide. This makes them the leading authority in biological pollination. The presence of the bumblebees makes it necessary to avoid the use of chemical insecticides. For this reason, Biobest produces and commercializes more than 30 kinds of beneficial insects and mites, which are used for biological crop protection. This made them the ideal company to contact for advise and expertise.
After signing in at the reception we presented our project to prof. Felix Wäckers, their head of R&D. Not only did he give some excellent advise, but with his help it will be possible to perform experiments with both ladybugs, aphids and perhaps even other insects.
But our visit didn’t end there! Besides an interesting discussion we also got a guided tour of the facilities. Needless to say we are very excited to get to work there!

Members of this and previous years' Calgary iGEM team came to visit Leuven, and after a few Belgian bears, they were willing to give us lots of tips & tricks to get through iGEM this summer. We noticed that the Belgian beers were a bit harder than they could handle ;-)

Collaboration with other teams is important, so we went to Ghent to visit our colleagues of the University of Ghent. First, we went to the Faculty of Bioscience engineering, but everything was closed cause of the Gentse Feesten. We met four friendly students of the team and took some time to know each other. We talked about our projects and exchanged some ideas. Our view on the project is totally different, and so we learned from each other. They already had a nice overview of the literature, while we already did a lot of work for sponsoring, modelling and human practices. We made a common press article, and hopefully we'll get synthetic biology and our projects in the picture here in Belgium. We’ll see each other soon again at Marktrock in Leuven.

Some new reading material has arrived, thanks to our sympathizer Eos! Eos is a popular Belgian scientific magazine, publishing monthly issues. They featured our story in one of their publications.

Today Lukas, Sylvie, Sander and Tina had a meeting with Tim Beliën and Dany Bylemans from pcfruit. Pcfruit is a station for research and advisory services of fruit growing, situated on three locations in Limburg ,a province of Belgium. They deal with a range of research activities concerning the most productive varieties of cherries, strawberries, apples or pears, biological fruit growing, the realisation of high quality fruit with a minimum of spraying, the art of attracting birds of prey, predatory mites and bugs and so on. We were warmly welcomed, and got to taste some fresh apple juice while we presented our project. We were glad to receive some thoughtful remarks and advice from people with good expertise, and we're looking forward to a possible collaboration for some experiments in the near future.

We're not only working in the lab or on our computers... Can you guess what we're doing?

Today was the yearly farmers' fair in Leuven, an opportunity we couldn't pass. We went out and asked the farmers what they thought of our project, since they are our main target audience. The results can be found here.

Aurelie and Tomas talking with a farmer

Some lovely soft sheep at the fair