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
File(s)
Author(s)
Type
Journal Article
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.
Date Issued
2022-07-15
Date Acceptance
2022-05-15
Citation
eLife, 2022, 11
ISSN
2050-084X
Publisher
eLife Sciences Publications Ltd
Journal / Book Title
eLife
Volume
11
Copyright Statement
© 2022, Fowler et al. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.
License URL
Sponsor
Wellcome Trust
Identifier
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/35588296
PII: 75046
Grant Number
WDAI_P83556
Subjects
M. tuberculosis
antibiotics
citizen science
clinical microbiology
infectious disease
microbiology
tuberculosis
Antitubercular Agents
Humans
Microbial Sensitivity Tests
Mycobacterium tuberculosis
Tuberculosis
Volunteers
Publication Status
Published
Coverage Spatial
England
Article Number
ARTN e7504
Date Publish Online
2022-05-19