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.
posted on 2022-07-21, 08:21authored byPhilip W Fowler, Carla Wright, Helen Spiers, Tingting Zhu, Elisabeth ML Baeten, Sarah W Hoosdally, Ana Luíza Gibertoni Cruz, Aysha Roohi, Samaneh Kouchaki, Timothy M Walker, Timothy EA Peto, Grant Miller, Chris Lintott, David Clifton, Derrick W Crook, A Sarah Walker, The Zooniverse Volunteer Community, The CRyPTIC Consortium
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.
Funding
Crick (Grant ID: 10004, Grant title: STP Electron Microscopy)
Crick (Grant ID: 10218, Grant title: Wilkinson, R FC001218)