Category: BashTheBug on the Zooniverse

Like many of you, the researchers behind BashTheBug have been at home for a while now due to restrictions put in place to slow the progress of this COVID-19 epidemic.

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.

As of midnight Tue 10 March 2020 you had all done 1,959,626 classifications and so we will reach two million classifications later this week.

To celebrate we are creating a wordle out of words you send us and a montage of images you upload. To contribute click this link.

The deadline is midnight on Mon 6 April 2020.

Click here if you want to see the montage of images we made when we reached one million classifications,

Yesterday evening (UK time) the Zooniverse sent an email to all their Citizen Scientists encouraging them to give BashTheBug a try.

By midnight you’d all done 26,208 classifications bringing us to 1,959,626 classifications. Thank you.

Wow. We emailed you all a few weeks back about how we needed your help catching up with some data and you have responded!

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.

We are advertising for a Part-time Citizen Science Project Co-ordinator to come and work with us in Oxford improving BashTheBug, in particular how the project engages, informs and educates its existing base of volunteers, as well as reaching out to new audiences.

The closing date is Monday 25 November 2019.

For more information please see the Job Advert.