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

Philip Fowler , Carla Wright , Helen Spiers , Tingting Zhu , Elisabeth Ml Baeten , Sarah Hoosdally , Ana Gibertoni Cruz , Aysha Roohi , Samaneh Kouchaki , Timothy Walker , Timothy Ea Peto , Grant Miller , Chris Lintott , David Clifton , Derrick Crook , A. Sarah Walker , Philip Supply (1)

1 CIIL - Centre d’Infection et d’Immunité de Lille - INSERM U 1019 - UMR 9017 - UMR 8204

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.

Domaines: Sciences du Vivant [q-bio]

Philip Fowler, Carla Wright, Helen Spiers, Tingting Zhu, Elisabeth Ml Baeten, et al.. 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, 2022, 11, ⟨10.7554/eLife.75046⟩. ⟨hal-03837128⟩