NIHR PPI In Action Webinar on BashTheBug

As part of the NIHR’s “PPI In Action” series, Philip Fowler gave a webinar on Friday 22 May 2026 entitled:

Running large online Citizen Science projects on the Zooniverse: my experience of setting up BashTheBug to help with our tuberculosis research.

He talked about what problem we asked the citizen scientists to help us solve, how the Zooniverse works , from both the perspective of a citizen scientist and a scientist setting up a project, and the two subsequent Zooniverse projects that have been successfully run out of our Unit.

The webinar is now available via NIHRtv on YouTube.

During the four years it was running, 46,427 people contributed to BashTheBug and collectively they classified 4,746,420 images of M. tuberculosis growing on different concentrations of one of 13 antibiotics. Their consensus readings were very consistent and were combined with the original readings taken by the laboratory scientists, as well as AMyGDA and, more recently, a machine learning algorithm, TMAS, to reduce the measurement error in the dataset of >20,000 clinical tuberculosis samples collected by the CRyPTIC project.

You can read more about CRyPTIC here and download the latest dataset (v3.4.0), which includes all the classifications made by all the citizen scientists from Zenodo.