Quarterly User Update (January – March 2025)
Welcome to our community update on our 2025 activities and events so far – covering announcements and highlights; and celebrating accomplishments from our team, users, and collaborators.
Community Highlights
Mikayla Borton holds a sample from one of the rivers.
The first featured community member this year was Dr. Mikayla Borton (https://www.kbase.us/news/mikayla-borton/), who led the recently published effort of cataloging the functional microbiomes of North American rivers through the Genome Resolved Open Watersheds database (GROWdb). Mikayla and the GROW team collaborated with KBase, the Joint Genome Institute, and the National Microbiome Data Collaborative to make this resource widely available. Then Dr. Beatriz Jorrin-Rubio (https://www.kbase.us/news/beatriz-jorrin-rubio/) helped KBase reach a new milestone with creating the 200,000 Narrative on the platform. Beatriz is a postdoctoral research associate studying plant-microbe interactions through nitrogen-fixing bacteria rhizobia at the University of Oxford.
If you are interested in a KBase Highlight on your work, project or any contributions, email us at engage@kbase.us.
Some faculty members that participated in the workshop at NEIU: Stefan Tsonchev, Ellen Dow (KBase), Nadja Insel, Jorge Cantu (front), Aaron Schirmer, Joel Olfelt, Emina Stojkovic.
The KBase team was invited by Dr. Emina Stojkovic to visit Northeastern Illinois University (NEIU) in Chicago as part of a data science training workshop series. In January, Josè Faria and Janaka Edirisinghe introduced the platform during a data science workshop for faculty across STEM departments from Biology to Chemistry to Earth Systems to Economics. As a follow-up in March, Ellen Dow presented resources from the KBase Educators Program and led in-depth training for NEIU faculty, demonstrating how KBase can be integrated in courses and train future scientists in computational biology.
On March 25, KBase kicked off a series of webinars covering isolate genome analysis from raw data to publication in collaboration with the American Society for Microbiology (https://asm.org/webinars/from-bench-to-publication-identification-and-analy) . Look for the Q2 user update in July to read more about the outcomes of this series!
Publications using KBase
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 the impact of alkaloids on the skin microbiomes of poison frogs in Ecuador (Caty et al. 2025); extracting metagenome-assembled genomes from the metagenomes of built-environment biogas reactors (Prabhaharan et al. 2025); and a novel anaerobic bacterium isolated from a soft coral species (da Silva et al. 2025).
Request a DOI for your static Narrative to cite within your publications and track dataset metrics to understand how the KBase community uses your published data. 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.
Summary
To close out our update, here is a summary documenting January through March 2025 user numbers. Keep doing great science in KBase, our team is here to support you.
KBase by the numbers from the January through March 2025 Quarter Report.
