RT Journal Article SR Electronic T1 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 JF bioRxiv FD Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory SP 2021.07.20.453060 DO 10.1101/2021.07.20.453060 A1 Philip W Fowler A1 Carla Wright A1 Helen Spiers A1 Tingting Zhu A1 Elisabeth ML Baeten A1 Sarah W Hoosdally A1 Ana LuĂ­za Gibertoni Cruz A1 Aysha Roohi A1 Samaneh Kouchaki A1 Timothy M Walker A1 Timothy EA Peto A1 Grant Miller A1 Chris Lintott A1 David Clifton A1 Derrick W Crook A1 A Sarah Walker A1 The Zooniverse Volunteer Community A1 The CRyPTIC Consortium YR 2021 UL http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2021/09/13/2021.07.20.453060.abstract 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.