BashTheBug

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.

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).

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.