A crowd of BashTheBug volunteers reproducibly and accurately measure the minimum inhibitory concentrations of 13 antitubercular drugs from photographs of 96-well broth microdilution plates

Abstract

Tuberculosis is a respiratory disease that is treatable with antibiotics. An increasing prevalence of resistance means that to ensure a good treatment outcome it is desirable to test the susceptibility of each infection to different antibiotics. Conventionally this is done by culturing a clinical sample and then exposing aliquots to a panel of antibiotics, Using 96-well broth micro dilution plates with each well containing a lyophilised predetermined amount of an antibiotic is a convenient and cost-effective way to measure the MICs of several drugs at once for a clinical sample. Although accurate, this is still an expensive and slow process that requires highly skilled and experienced laboratory scientists. Here we show that, through the BashTheBug project hosted on the Zooniverse citizen science platform, a crowd of volunteers can reproducibly and accurately determine the MICs for 13 drugs and that simply taking the median or mode of 11-17 independent classifications is sufficient. There is therefore a potential role for crowds to support (but not supplant) the role of experts in antibiotic susceptibility testing.

Bedaquiline and clofazimine resistance in Mycobacterium tuberculosis: an in-vitro and in-silico data analysis

“…15 The plates were read manually by diagnostic laboratory scientists, by the automated reading software Automated Mycobacterial Growth Detection Algorithm, 16 and by a citizen science project (BashTheBug) for additional verification. 17 Procedural details of MIC testing are provided in appendix 1 (pp 4–5 ).…”

Online citizen science with the Zooniverse for analysis of biological volumetric data

“…Multiple projects to date have demonstrated that citizen scientists can be effectively engaged in a wide variety of biological image analysis tasks, such as the tracing of connected neurons through electron microscopy (EM) data in Eyewire (Kim et al, 2014), clicking on protein particles in cryo-EM data in Microscopy Masters (Bruggemann et al, 2018), and scoring tumor markers in pathology samples in Cell slider (Dos Reis et al, 2015), amongst others (Smittenaar et al, 2018;Ørting et al, 2019;Benhajali et al, 2020;Fisch et al, 2021;Fowler et al, 2022). The efficacy of applying online citizen science for the analysis of biological image data, both as an avenue for producing novel research and as a powerful tool for public engagement, has led to a rise in interest from the biological volumetric imaging research community in applying this methodology.…”

Infection Inspection: Using the power of citizen science to help with image-based prediction of antibiotic resistance inEscherichia coli

“…Citizen science collaborations between volunteers and research teams can play an important role in educating the public about scientific concepts and have been instrumental in recognizing complex patterns within biological data, starting with research in ecology and extending to various biological fields, including protein folding, DNA sequence alignment, electron microscopy, and microbiology [5][6][7] .…”

“…A previous project hosted on Zooniverse, Bash the Bug 7 , successfully engaged citizen scientists to look at images of bacterial growth and identify their resistance to antimicrobial drugs. This demonstrated how citizen science can be used for antimicrobial resistance research and the development of novel diagnostic tools.…”

“…Citizen science collaborations between volunteers and research teams can play an important role in educating the public about scientific concepts and have been instrumental in recognizing complex patterns within biological data, starting with research in ecology and extending to various biological fields, including protein folding, DNA sequence alignment, electron microscopy, and microbiology 5–7 . These projects enable individuals of diverse backgrounds and expertise levels to contribute to scientific data collection and analysis, empowering them to actively advance and acquire knowledge in various disciplines.…”