BashTheBug

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.

Wow, last Monday you reached 1.5 million classifications. Thank you.

After feedback from a number of volunteers, we’ve decided to change (nearly all) the workflows so you can classify images of M. tuberculosis growing using the new Zooniverse mobile app.

Until recently the Zooniverse app, which is available for Android and iOS, could only handle very simple Citizen Science projects requiring a simple yes/no. They have just updated the app so it can handle multi-answer questions, which is what BashTheBug needs, so we are testing BashTheBug on mobile devices and would love your thoughts and comments.

Our second calendar year and it has been a busy one. Highlights of the year include

• reaching a million classifications!
• meeting a volunteer for the first time
• having our logo crocheted 
• being inspiration for some textiles
• appearing on an Oxford Sparks podcast
• featuring in the Bacterial World exhibition at the Oxford Museum of Natural History
• appearing as part of a series of talks on TB
• having 15,000 volunteers try BashTheBug in one day after the Zooniverse emailed everyone
• showing BashTheBug to the public at events at Oxford Brookes and the Oxford Museum of Natural History.

In 2019 our first scientific papers will appear about how BashTheBug is helping the CRyPTIC project create an accurate dataset of the antibiotic susceptibility of thousands of clinical TB samples collecting around the globe and how we can use this to infer what genetic variation confers resistance. Watch this space!