Fowler, Philip W; Wright, Carla; Spiers, Helen; Zhu, Tingting; Baeten, Elisabeth ML; Hoosdally, Sarah W; Gibertoni Cruz, Ana L; Roohi, Aysha; Kouchaki, Samaneh; Walker, Timothy M; +8 more... Peto, Timothy EA; Miller, Grant; Lintott, Chris; Clifton, David; Crook, Derrick W; Walker, A Sarah; Zooniverse Volunteer Community; CRyPTIC Consortium; (2022) 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. eLife, 11. e75046-. ISSN 2050-084X DOI: https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.75046
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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.
Item Type | Article |
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Research Centre | TB Centre |
PubMed ID | 35588296 |
Elements ID | 181880 |
Official URL | http://dx.doi.org/10.7554/elife.75046 |
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Filename: Fowler_etal_2022_A-crowd-of-bashthebug-volunteers.pdf
Licence: Creative Commons: Attribution 4.0
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