Off to a running start with the KBase Community!
Apr 17, 2024

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!

The graphic provides the following statistics for KBase from January to March 2024. There were 1905 new user accounts added to the platform for a total of 36762 accounts. The total number of Narratives is 86,800 with 3813 new Narratives. User data grew by 84 terabytes for a total of 858 terabytes. Publicly available data grew by 196 GB to 21.8 TB. New publications cited using KBase came in at 30 for a total of 595 publications since 2014. Top App categories were annotation, communities, and assembly. Help Board Tickets had 166 total, including 38 Closed Questions, 46 Open Questions, 45 Open Bugs and 37 Closed Bugs that fill out a pie chart. X had 11,300 Impressions, 1 new follower and 2092 total followers. LinkedIn had 2151 Impressions, 143 Page Views, and 250 Followers. YouTube had 1 new video post, along with 4,600 views, 58 new subscribers for a total of 1132 subscribers; the kbase.us site had 16,000 new visitors, 14,000 active users and 61,000 visits to the site.

Ellen Dow
Ellen Dow
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

Ellen G. Dow, Ph.D. is a member of the outreach, communications, and user development team. Inspired by involvement in science outreach throughout graduate school, she left the bench to gain experience in informal education and cultivate community engagement from the general public to science sectors. A molecular biologist by training, Ellen applies her research experience to support scientists and develop resources for the KBase community.