Author: koolcarlamae

Hi All,

We hope you are all well and keeping safe and sane during these trying and daunting times

We wanted to say Thank You!

You have helped BashtheBug reach over 4 million classifications:

Total classifications since the project began: 4, 028, 152

You have looked at over 15,000 samples, which has helped the *CRyPTIC project prepare its first dataset for release, which will form the basis of: several big publications and a number of smaller ones including machine learning, a new catalogue and a genome-wide association study to look for genes that confer resistance no one has noticed yet.

Well done to all our volunteers for making this happening!

*The project is part of the CRyPTIC Comprehensive Resistance Prediction for Tuberculosis: an International Consortium is a world-wide collaboration between tuberculosis (TB) research institutions all over the world to achieve better, faster and more targeted treatment of multidrug-resistant TB via genetic resistance prediction.

We would like to give a special Shout Out.. and Thank You to our Top 20 volunteers:

They have collectively classified over 81,000 images which is just over 19% of the overall classifications.

Over the last five years since 2015, we have collected more than 100,000 samples from patients with Tuberculosis, from all over the world.

We have tested which antibiotics work on every single sample we collected, and determined the genome of the *M. Tuberculosis* bacteria in each sample.

So far with the Bash the Bug Volunteers help with classifications:

• We have conducted the largest and most comprehensive study to date investigating whether Whole Genome Sequencing (WGS) can be used to predict whether the four most common drugs used to treat tuberculosis can cure a specific infection i.e. the infection is susceptible to the drugs.
• We performed WGS across 9 genes associated with drug susceptibility and resistance on 10,290 tuberculosis samples from people in 16 different countries across six continents.
• We used the WGS to predict whether each of the four drugs could be used to cure the infection and then compared our results with the known drug-susceptibility profiles.
• We found WGS could be used to predict drug-susceptibility and demonstrated how it might direct which drug to use in treatment. This has been published in the New England Journal of Medicine.
• By using WGS our understanding of the genetic code of tuberculosis is now so detailed that we can predict which commonly used drugs are best used to successfully treat a patient’s infection and which are not.

Without the help of our Bash the Bug Volunteers all of the above would not have happened!

Well done and Thank You.

We have appointed Carla Wright as the new Citizen Science Coordinator.

Carla will be working on the  project along side Phil to help support our amazing volunteers.