Nearly a month after the public launch, the Zooniverse citizen scientists have done a staggering 152,816 classifications. That brings us to 24% through this initial dataset and 47% of the way towards completing an important subset of the data that will let us start some initial analysis. Despite, the number of classifications and new volunteers falling week-on-week, the volunteers still did 20,000 classifications last week and 300 people tried BashTheBug for the first time. And the Zooniverse haven’t emailed their users yet.

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Another amazing week. Together the Zooniverse citizen scientists did 28,721 classifications this week, bringing the grand total to 108,833. This is 19% of the way towards classifying all the subjects currently loaded (and in reality we are a bit over a third – 36% – of the way towards being able to do some very interesting analysis). Last week 444 people tried BashTheBug for the first time, bringing the total number of volunteers to 1,578 since launch, and including the beta-testers, 2,557. Again, there are two volunteers who have done an astonishing number of classifications: 2,360 and 2,339. Thank you everyone for all your work and please keep it up!

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BashTheBug went live on the Zooniverse website a bit over a week ago, just after midnight on Friday 7 April. Since then 1,134 people have participated, which is an average of 162 people trying BashTheBug for the first time everyday — see below.

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BashtheBug has been covered so far by

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Thank you to everyone who had a go at BashTheBug yesterday, by the end of the day you’d done 7,724 classifications which is awesome. Also, thank you to everyone who retweeted or mentioned BashTheBug to someone else. Our favourite tweet so far has to be this one

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Today is the official launch of the BashTheBug citizen science project, hosted by Zooniverse.org.

The project invites you to help fight antibiotic resistance in Tuberculosis (TB), a disease that affected over 10 million people globally in 2015. You’ll be shown an image like the one below.

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A group of us from Modernising Medical Microbiology headed off to the Science Museum in London this afternoon to talk about antibiotic resistance with, well, anyone at one of their Lates events. This one was called “The Next Big Thing” and was co-sponsored by the Royal Society. Our stand, which was called “Resistance is Futile!”, was a mixture of games (try copying a DNA sequence … using a dance mat) and information (we have a couple of Oxford Nanopore MinION 3rd generation DNA sequencers in our pockets).

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Thanks to all the Zooniverse.org beta testers who have tried out our BashTheBug project these last six days. In that short period of time 629 volunteers made a staggering total of 30,262 classifications. We’ve also got feedback on how easy or hard the task was from 164 volunteers.
We are currently making some change to the task, including the help text and the tutorial and hope to launch in April 2017.

If you’d like to be informed when BashTheBug launches, follow us on Twitter or leave your email address at the bottom of this page.

The beautiful background photographs of the bacteria growing in petri dishes are the result of an art project, Gut Flora, that is a collaboration between Nicola Fawcett, MMM, and Chris Wood, Oxford Medical Illustration (Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International – CC BY-NC-SA 4.0). The BashTheBug typeface and logo were designed by David Hawkins.

BashTheBug is an online project studying, with the help of the public, antibiotic resistance in Tuberculosis (TB). It will be launched  on the well-known and successful citizen science platform, Zooniverse.org, in April 2017.

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