In this paper, Alice Brankin calculates how different mutations in the DNA gyrase affect the binding of an antibiotic, moxifloxacin, and thereby potentially whether those mutations confer resistance or not. She calculates the relative binding free energy using thermodynamic integration, a method that is derived from classical statistical mechanics. To accompany these results, Philip Fowler, […]
Author: Philip Fowler
Philip W Fowler is a computational biophysicist studying antimicrobial resistance working at the John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford.
The large and comprehensive dataset of clinical tuberculosis isolates collected by the CRyPTIC project is described in detail by this paper, just published in PLoS Biology. Each isolate was whole genome sequenced and had its minimum inhibitory concentration to 13 different antibiotics measured using a bespoke 96-well broth microdilution plate. Alice Brankin, along with Kerri […]
Since the primary goal of CRyPTIC was to map the genetic variants in M. tuberculosis associated with resistance to different antibiotics, this genome-wide association study is one of the key research outputs of the project. It brings together all the samples with genetic and drug susceptibility testing (DST) data and therefore relies on all the […]
Yesterday eLife published the first paper from our citizen science project, BashTheBug, which was launched in April 2017 on the Zooniverse platform. (Update on 19 July 2022: the final formatted version of the paper has been posted on eLife). Through BashTheBug we asked for volunteers to classify images of M. tuberculosis growing on a range […]
ReadItAndKeep is a new human-read decontamination algorithm that works by mapping the reads in a FASTQ file to the reference SARS-CoV-2 genome. This works because SARS-CoV-2 genetic variation is not so high as to lead to reads being incorrectly discarded and means the algorithm, which relies on minimap2, is both fast and has a low […]
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From left to right: Dylan, Alice, Charlotte, Matty and Phil (Viktoria had only just left the month before) See Members page.
BashTheBug is a citizen science project hosted on the Zooniverse platform that we launched in April 2017 and asked volunteers to help us assess how well 20,637 clinical samples of M. tuberculosis grow on one of 13 different antibiotics. To help engage with the volunteers it has its own blog, that has grown into the […]
The CRyPTIC project collecting over 20,000 clinical samples of TB and for each, sequencing its genome and testing its susceptibility to 13 different antibiotics. A lovely unintended consequence of compiling such a large high-quality dataset is that CRyPTIC was invited to form part of the team that collected data and compiled the first catalogue of […]
You can listen to Philip Fowler talk about the Global Pathogen Analysis System (GPAS) as part of the ORACLE Road Show by clicking here. We hope in the long term to translate into GPAS the predictive models we are creating for tuberculosis.
This preprint describes some software, ReadItAndKeep, that rapidly removes host (i.e. human) genetic information from a sample. This is necessary to ensure that a sample containing SARS-CoV-2 genetic reads cannot be linked to the individual who gave the sample whilst it is being processed by GPAS in the cloud. Martin Hunt and Zam Iqbal did […]