ArticleeLife2022
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.
Article in eLife, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 14 papers.
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Who cites it
14 citing papers in PubMed, 32 citations in OpenAlex.
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- An improved catalogue for whole-genome sequencing prediction of bedaquiline resistance inMicrobial genomics · 2025Article
- Predicting rifampicin resistance inERJ open research · 2025Article
- The academic impact of Open Science: a scoping review.Royal Society open science · 2025Review
- Deep learning-based framework for Mycobacterium tuberculosis bacterial growth detection for antimicrobial susceptibility testing.Computational and structural biotechnology journal · 2025Article
- Infection Inspection: using the power of citizen science for image-based prediction of antibiotic resistance in Escherichia coli treated with ciprofloxacin.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Effect of Laurus nobilis on bacteria and human transforming growth factor-β1.Revista da Associacao Medica Brasileira (1992) · 2024Article
- Online citizen science with the Zooniverse for analysis of biological volumetric data.Histochemistry and cell biology · 2023Article
- Bedaquiline and clofazimine resistance in Mycobacterium tuberculosis: an in-vitro and in-silico data analysis.The Lancet. Microbe · 2023Article
- Reply: Epidemiological cut-off values for a 96-well broth microdilution plate for high-throughput research antibiotic susceptibility testing ofThe European respiratory journal · 2023Article
- Epidemiological cut-off values for a 96-well broth microdilution plate for high-throughput research antibiotic susceptibility testing ofThe European respiratory journal · 2022Article
- A data compendium associating the genomes of 12,289 Mycobacterium tuberculosis isolates with quantitative resistance phenotypes to 13 antibiotics.PLoS biology · 2022Article
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Authors and funding
18 authors at 2 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
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, each being present at a pre-determined concentration, thereby determining if the sample isresistant or susceptible to each sample. The minimum inhibitory concentration (MIC) of a drug is the lowestconcentration that inhibits growth and is a more useful quantity but requires each sample to be tested at a range ofconcentrations for each drug. Using 96-well broth micro dilution plates with each well containing a lyophilised pre-determined 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.
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