Quarterly User Update (October – December 2021) and review of 2021
Welcome to the final Quarterly KBase User update of 2021, where we celebrate accomplishments for the year. We blew past our 20,000 user goal, wrapping up the year with over 21,000 users and ~47,000 Narratives.
Community Highlight
We wrapped up the year with two community highlights – one profiling work by Mark Flynn, a Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) and Bacterial-Fungal Interactions Science Focus Area (SFA) software developer, and a second showcasing our KBase Educators Working Groups.
The Bacterial-Fungal Interactions SFA (https://www.kbase.us/research/chain-sfa/) has been collaborating with KBase for several years to integrate tools to support broader and improved taxonomic annotation. Mark worked with several KBase team members to integrate the novel bioinformatics tool Genomic Origin Through Taxonomic Challenge (GOTTCHA2) designed to return a low false negative rate. Read more about Mark’s work with KBase here: https://www.kbase.us/community-highlight-taxonomy-tools/ and view the April webinar here: https://youtu.be/N-_89NJu9Sos.
The KBase Educators Working Groups were also a 2021 highlight, with a lot of amazing teaching and training resources created and shared with KBase community members involved in education. We even co-authored a joint publication with many of our working group members, released in Frontiers in late October – https://doi.org/10.3389/feduc.2021.711535. And the community of educators continues to grow, led by KBase staff member Dr. Ellen Dow. We look forward to another great year of community-driven collaboration in 2022! Read more about the KBase Educators Working Groups, and how to get involved, here: https://www.kbase.us/educator-working-groups/.
To see all KBase highlights, visit our News page. If you are interested in a KBase Highlight about your work or project, email us at engage@kbase.us.
Publications using KBase
KBase Users had a very productive 2021, publishing a record number of articles using KBase for data analyses and sharing.
We also issued 23 Static Narrative DOIs for user publications in the last year, and we have started tracking dataset metrics to understand how the community uses published KBase data. If you are curious about how we are working to measure the impact of your data analysis efforts, beyond just the publications, contact us!
In 2021, 137 publications cited KBase in their methods section and an additional 37 publications mentioned KBase.
All publications using KBase are available at: https://www.kbase.us/research. If you used KBase for your research, and we are missing your publication, please let us know at engage@kbase.us!
New Webinars
The final quarter of 2021 was focused on the release of some major new functionality on the platform – the representation of environmental samples! The first “Introduction to Samples” webinar aired on 29 Sept, with follow up sessions on creating and managing your samples (13 October), analyzing amplicon data in the context of sample information (11 November), and connecting metabolomics data (8 December). All webinars are available on the KBase YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/doekbase.
Over the course of the full year, KBase hosted 21 virtual workshops and webinars during 2021, reaching 1084 KBase users!
Summary
And finally, to close out our update, here is a summary of our amazing 2021 user numbers. Keep doing great science in KBase. The KBase team is here to support you!
