PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Philip W Fowler
AU  - Carla Wright
AU  - Helen Spiers
AU  - Tingting Zhu
AU  - Elisabeth ML Baeten
AU  - Sarah W Hoosdally
AU  - Ana Luíza Gibertoni Cruz
AU  - Aysha Roohi
AU  - Samaneh Kouchaki
AU  - Timothy M Walker
AU  - Timothy EA Peto
AU  - Grant Miller
AU  - Chris Lintott
AU  - David Clifton
AU  - Derrick W Crook
AU  - A Sarah Walker
AU  - The Zooniverse Volunteer Community
AU  - The CRyPTIC Consortium
TI  - BashTheBug: a crowd of volunteers reproducibly and accurately measure the minimum inhibitory concentrations of 13 antitubercular drugs from photographs of 96-well broth microdilution plates
AID  - 10.1101/2021.07.20.453060
DP  - 2021 Jan 01
TA  - bioRxiv
PG  - 2021.07.20.453060
4099  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2021/09/13/2021.07.20.453060.short
4100  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2021/09/13/2021.07.20.453060.full
AB  - 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, thereby determining the minimum inhibitory concentration (MIC) of 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 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.Competing Interest StatementThe authors have declared no competing interest.