Skip to content
Fowler Lab
Fowler Lab

Predicting antibiotic resistance de novo

  • News
  • Research
    • Overview
    • Manifesto
    • Software
    • Reproducibility
    • Publications
  • Members
  • Teaching
  • Contact
    • PhDs
  • Wiki
Fowler Lab
Fowler Lab

Predicting antibiotic resistance de novo

bashthebug.net alpha launch

Philip Fowler, 3rd October 20166th April 2017

I’m planning to launch a citizen science project, bashthebug.net, in 2017 which has two distinct ways anyone can help combat antibiotic resistance. I’ve revamped and relaunched what will ultimately become the public-facing project website – please have a look.

The first strand is closer to the light of day and will help the international Tuberculosis consortium, CRyPTIC. This global group of researchers, of which I am a part, will be collecting over 100,000 samples from patients with TB. Each sample will be tested to see which antibiotics are effective as well as having the genome of its M.tuberculosis bacterium sequenced. In practice, because each sample is measured at least three different times, that means looking at 300,000 96-well plates. Step forward Zooniverse! This type of large-scale image classification is exactly the sort of thing Zooniverse Citizen Science projects excel at. I hope to launch this project in early 2017.

The second citizen science project is more complex and I have recently applied for funding. As described in my Research, I am developing methods that can predict whether novel or rarely-observed mutations cause resistance to an antibiotic (or not). These require a lot of computer resource and the idea is to build a volunteer computing project, like [climate prediction.net](http://climate prediction.net), using the BOINC framework, so that volunteers can download a program onto their laptop or desktop. When they’re not using their computer, the program will retrieve part of a problem and run the simulations on their machine before returning the results over the internet. These type of project is more complicated and requires more infrastructure to be setup, but with some luck, I’d hope to have a soft launch late in 2017.

Share this:

  • Click to share on X (Opens in new window) X
  • Click to share on Bluesky (Opens in new window) Bluesky
  • Click to email a link to a friend (Opens in new window) Email
  • Click to share on LinkedIn (Opens in new window) LinkedIn
  • Click to share on Mastodon (Opens in new window) Mastodon

Related

citizen science computing distributed computing

Post navigation

Previous post
Next post

Related Posts

antimicrobial resistance

New preprint: Infection Inspection

12th December 202312th December 2023

Some great work by Conor Feehily, Nicole Stoesser and others, including collaborators from the Department…

Share this:

  • Click to share on X (Opens in new window) X
  • Click to share on Bluesky (Opens in new window) Bluesky
  • Click to email a link to a friend (Opens in new window) Email
  • Click to share on LinkedIn (Opens in new window) LinkedIn
  • Click to share on Mastodon (Opens in new window) Mastodon
Read More
computing

GROMACS on AWS: compiling GCC

27th January 201623rd September 2018

These are some quick instructions on how to build a more recent version of GCC…

Share this:

  • Click to share on X (Opens in new window) X
  • Click to share on Bluesky (Opens in new window) Bluesky
  • Click to email a link to a friend (Opens in new window) Email
  • Click to share on LinkedIn (Opens in new window) LinkedIn
  • Click to share on Mastodon (Opens in new window) Mastodon
Read More

New publication: BashTheBug works!

20th May 202219th July 2022

Yesterday eLife published the first paper from our citizen science project, BashTheBug, which was launched…

Share this:

  • Click to share on X (Opens in new window) X
  • Click to share on Bluesky (Opens in new window) Bluesky
  • Click to email a link to a friend (Opens in new window) Email
  • Click to share on LinkedIn (Opens in new window) LinkedIn
  • Click to share on Mastodon (Opens in new window) Mastodon
Read More

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Privacy & Cookies: This site uses cookies. By continuing to use this website, you agree to their use.
To find out more, including how to control cookies, see here: Cookie Policy
    ©2025 Fowler Lab | WordPress Theme by SuperbThemes