Quarterly User Update (April – June 2026)
This update covers our 2026 activities and events from April through June – celebrating accomplishments from our team, users, and collaborators with a focus on training and advancing skills across the community.
Community Highlights
Educators at CSU Spur documenting environmental metadata along the South Platte River. Photo courtesy of Debarshi Dasgupta.
Our latest stories about the KBase community cover how educators have been integrating the platform into their courses to train the next generation of research scientists. In May, Steven Biller shared how he has utilized KBase as a tool for training students how to analyze genomic data (https://www.kbase.us/news/steven-biller/). For June’s highlight, we recapped the 2026 MICROnet training workshop that was a collaboration with the Colorado State Microbiome Network (https://www.kbase.us/news/micronet-jun-2026/).
If you are interested in sharing your work or projects in a KBase Highlight, email us at [email protected].
KBase Publications
The platform and team behind KBase continues to support users to analyze their data and follow the FAIR (findable, accessible, interoperable, reusable) data principles through to publication. Studies published this quarter included:
- Seasonal patterns of denitrification in lake microbial communities are potentially driven by a microbial consortium that breaks down chitin and reduces nitrate to nitrogen (Callbeck et al. 2026);
- Comparison of diversity and phylogenetic distribution of type IV secretion systems, responsible for genetic material release and uptake, in phytopathogenic and environmental Ralstonia (Cowell et al. 2026);
- Characterization of an acidophilic bacterial consortium that drives sulfate-reduction during acid mine bioremediation (Valdez-Nuñez et al. 2026).
All publications using KBase are available at: https://www.kbase.us/research. If we are missing your publication citing KBase in your methods, please let us know at [email protected].
Training & Workshops
This spring, the KBase team had several training opportunities across research and academic communities. The 2026 ASM Spring training on in-depth workflows for draft isolate genomes from raw sequence through data publication concluded in April (https://asm.org/webinars/from-bench-to-publication-identification-and-analy). The second part of this series will pick up in September and cover advanced, hands-on isolate analysis (for details and registration: https://asm.org/webinars/advanced-genomic-feature-analysis-using-open-acces).
Colorado State Microbiome Network (CoSMic) workshop at Colorado State University in Fort Collins, CO. Photo courtesy of CoSMic.
In late April, we traveled to the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland, WA to co-facilitate a workshop on metagenomic data analysis in KBase during the Molecular Observation Network (MONet): Connect and Learn 2026 Meeting (https://www.emsl.pnnl.gov/events/monet-connect-and-learn-2026). The KBase team introduced the platform and analysis capabilities to attendees at the Soil Ecology Society 2026 Meeting (https://www.soilecologysociety.com/event-details/2026-meeting-2) in the Pinelands of New Jersey. The team also ran an introduction to KBase and metagenomic data analysis workshop at Colorado State University in Fort Collins, CO hosted by the Colorado State Microbiome Network (CoSMic; https://microbiomenetwork.colostate.edu/).
Summary
To close out our update, below is a graphical summary documenting our Q2 April-June 2026 user numbers. Keep doing great science in KBase. Remember, the KBase team is here to support you!
KBase by the numbers from April through June 2026.
