Community Highlight: Rian Pierneef
KBase has a large and active community of researchers using the platform across the African continent. In 2024, the KBase team collaborated with the Colorado State Microbiome Network (CoSMic), the National Microbiome Data Collaborative (NMDC), and the International Society for Microbial Ecology (ISME) to run a pre-conference workshop with ISME19 in Cape Town, South Africa. The From Reads to Function Workshop trained 25 early career participants from African countries on how to analyze metagenomic data using free, open-source tools on a publicly available dataset representing the Congo River microbiome. To the team’s excitement, this was just the beginning of in-person training workshops to take place in Africa using the KBase platform.
Rian Pierneef (left) and workshop participants/instructors at the Addis Ababa Science and Technology University. Photo courtesy of Rian Pierneef.
Rian Pierneef, PhD (RP), helped organize the 2024 ISME workshop, and has continued to organize additional bioinformatics analysis training sessions using KBase. Rian is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Biochemistry, Genetics and Microbiology at the University of Pretoria (UP).
Training events across Africa
The University of Pretoria Genomics Laboratory (UPGL) hosted the DIPLOMICS (Distributed Platform in Omics) Bioinformatics Workshop from July 22-24, 2025 in South Africa. Rian organized and ran the training with KBase during this workshop for 22 participants.
A second multi-day training event in 2025 took place at the Addis Ababa Science and Technology University in Ethiopia from November 24-28. The International Society for Microbial Ecology (ISME) and Applied Microbiology International (AMI) sponsored this event to gather microbiologists across disciplines of food systems, environmental sciences, and biotechnology. This bioinformatics training session served around 30 participants and used KBase as a platform to create microbial metagenomics analysis workflows.
Why use KBase for these workshops?
(RP) The platform really makes bioinformatics analyses accessible, irrespective of where you are and what level of experience the attendees are at. It can be daunting trying to train in a different country not knowing what the computational infrastructure and bioinformatics environment is like but with KBase it works effortlessly. Great job! Please keep it up.
Instructors and participants at the November training event sponsored by ISME and AMI. Photo courtesy of Rian Pierneef.
Can you share something from “behind the scenes”?
(RP) The usability and performance was fantastic and I can see various new apps have been included. The run times also seem to be a lot quicker. Thank you for managing a fantastic resource.
References & Links
Workshop Funding:
Applied Microbiology International (AMI) – https://appliedmicrobiology.org/
Distributed Platform in Omics (DIPLOMICS) – https://www.diplomics.org.za/
International Society of Microbial Ecology (ISME) – https://isme-microbes.org/
