A Tweet, a Blog, and an Unusual Bug: How Social Media and Open-Source Genomic Data Sharing Led to an International Scientific Collaboration

Background: In November 2015, the Wisconsin Department of Health Services (DHS) began tracking cases of an outbreak associated with an unusual bacterial pathogen, Elizabethkingia anophelis. These bacteria are seldom reported to cause illness in humans, but in this outbreak, Wisconsin DHS linked nearly 20 deaths to the bacteria by mid-March 2016.

Program background: DHS shared samples of the bacteria with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), where scientists with the agency’s Bacterial Special Pathogens Branch applied whole genome sequencing (WGS) and other tests to identify and characterize the bacteria. To make the sequence data openly available to other researchers, CDC scientists deposited the genetic data into the Sequence Read Archive at the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI), a public repository for biomedical and genomic information.

Evaluation Methods and Results: To help broadcast the availability of the sequence data, CDC’s Office of Advanced Molecular Detection (OAMD) tweeted a link to the genomic database. A tech-savvy scientist from OAMD retweeted the information from his personal Twitter account, further expanding its reach. Within eight hours, a genomic researcher in Australia noticed the tweet about the bacteria, which she had never heard of. She downloaded the sequence data, began looking for markers of antibiotic resistance, and mapped the genomes through a bioinformatics pipeline her lab had developed to identify features in the genome of these organisms. She then blogged her findings and replied to CDC’s tweet.

Conclusions: Within 24 hours, genomic researchers from France, the Netherlands, and the UK joined in the social media conversation and shared additional findings. Within seven days, social media (via Twitter and blogs) led researchers from around the world to join forces to find out why one rare bacteria was having such deadly effects.  

Implications for research and/or practice: This presentation will explore the power of social media to bring scientists together to investigate complex public health problems.