2023 - A Year in Review at KBase
The community of users and the KBase team were busy this past year! Here are a few highlights and updates from 2023.
A look at the numbers & trends
Users uploaded a lot of data to analyze on KBase! How much? At the end of Dec 2023, Users added over 765 TB data across ~83,000 Narratives. These totals increased by about 260 TB of data and 20,000 Narratives compared to 2022! As for analyzing this data, the system supported nearly 5,000,000 CPU hours of successful App runs.
Where are our users? Our 34,861 Users access data literally worldwide using the Narrative interface across 114 countries from researchers to instructors to students.
A log transformed visualization of unique user sessions across 114 countries for 2023.
You can see all of this work in publications across journals and research topics – from measuring metabolic processes in bioreactors to describing methanogenic archaea to assembling genomes from marine metagenomes (McGuire et al. 2023; Prakash et al. 2023; Barnes et al. 2023). There are a slew of research publications enabled by analysis in the Narrative!
Engaging with our community
The past year brought KBase back to face-to-face interactions with our community. We hosted and supported 16 events with over 600 participants throughout the year! In-person workshops were held at institutions like University of Wisconsin – Madison, North Carolina State University, and University of Massachusetts – Amherst, and programs such as JGI IMG’s Microbial Genomics and Metagenomics and the Long-read Isolate Sequencing and Assembly (LISA) workshop. We also introduced students to KBase through a couple National Science Foundation Research Experience for Undergraduate (REU) programs – the University of Tennessee – Knoxville REU Microbial Community Interactions and Functions and virtual National Summer Undergraduate Research Project (NSURP).
KBase Educators
The KBase Educators Program and Community continues to work with instructors that use KBase with their students. We have community-developed resources, including teaching Narratives, and peer support! The Organization has grown to 190 members in 2023, including folks from 24 different countries! Instructors are based at 167 institutions, with 44 members teaching at minority-serving institutions in the US.
This year, the program began to grow through a National Science Foundation Research Coordination Network for Undergraduate Biology Education Incubator. The RCN supports working groups of instructors developing teaching modules as part of a Microbiome Workforce Development Program (#2316244). Stay tuned for more updates and information from the Steering Committee and working group members!
Support on System
This past year, Zach Crockett began to lead our Help Desk with Miriam Land’s retirement. In 2023, Help Desk closed tickets for 182 questions and 99 bugs!
KBase Software Development Kit training was provided for bioinformatic developers to contribute analysis tools as KBase Apps. We released 31 new Apps, or upgrades, into production in 2023. Four of these releases were contributed by KBase Community Developers! Currently, we have five Community Developer Apps in beta for user testing, including tools for long-reads!
Want to be a beta tester?? Reach out to the team at engage@kbase.us or fill out a beta tester interest form.
KBase by the Numbers – 2023
KBase by the numbers from the Annual Report covering January through December 2023.
