BashTheBug is launched today!

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.

Each circular well has a sample of M.tuberculosis, the bug that causes TB. The top two wells have no antibiotic, so they give you an idea of how well the bug grows. The series of 5-8 wells shown below all a single antibiotic whose dose doubles each time you move a well to the right. In the example above that means the dosage in well 6 is 2x2x2x2x2x2=64 times higher than the dosage in well 1. You simply have to answer a question about how the bacteria are growing and if there is a dose of antibiotic above which the bacteria don’t grow.

We hope that, with your help, we will make 42 million classifications of images like this during the course of the project!