Quarterly User Update (January – March 2024)

Our first update on happenings in 2024 – covering announcements and highlights from January through March. 

Community Highlights

As part of the KBase Educators Program, KBase hosted a hybrid training workshop January for educators participating in a pilot project funded by a Research Coordination Network for Undergraduate Biology Education Incubator (NSF #2316244). The workshop reviewed newly developed materials and provided additional training from KBase and the National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON). Stay tuned for details!

If you are interested in a KBase Highlight on your work, project or any contributions, email us at engage@kbase.us.

Publications using KBase

The platform and team behind KBase supports users from analyzing their data and following FAIR (findable, accessible, interoperable, reusable) data principles through publication. As of March 2024, 30 published studies using KBase span from projects characterizing novel bacteria associated with marine sponges (Couceiro et al. 2024) to reconstructing metabolic models from microbes associated with Poplar trees (Wang et al. 2024) and taxonomic studies of macroalgal microbiomes (Lavecchia et al. 2024). 

A neat metagenomic dataset from a 2018 cruise that sampled microbes from deep ocean trenches is now available in KBase! You can find the Metagenome-Assembled Genomes or MAGs in FAIR Narratives (https://doi.org/10.25982/90888.1452/2327015; Peoples et al. 2019).   

Don’t forget to read up on how to publish in KBase. If you are curious about how we are working to measure the impact of your data analysis efforts, beyond publications, please contact us!

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 engage@kbase.us.

Webinars

In January, Kyle Sullivan (ORNL) introduced a suite of new tools to the platform that enable users to ‘Explore Plant Gene Linkages Using Random Walk with Restart.’ This webinar demonstrated how to build and explore gene-to-gene networks in KBase. The recording is available on the KBase YouTube page: https://youtu.be/Dq5kZ_Sacy0?si=nFrsECBB_NTdkpMe. 

Summary

To close out our update, here is a summary documenting January through March 2024 user numbers. Keep doing great science in KBase. The KBase team is here to support you!