Understanding how biotic interactions may influence microbial community structure and, in turn, how structure can influence ecosystem function and biogeochemical cycling remain key challenges of microbial ecology. This workshop will introduce the Department of Energy's Systems Biology Knowledgebase (KBase) and demonstrate how the unified and scalable environment allows the combination and analysis of multiple data streams to gain mechanistic insight into interactions within the microbial community.

KBase is a software and data platform that integrates multiple data types and analytical tools to enable users to compare and model plant and microbial physiology and community dynamics. Users can upload their own data, analyze it in the context of collaborators' data or the broader set of publicly available data, build increasingly realistic organism models, and share and publish their workflows and conclusions in an open and reproducible way using the Narrative Interface.

This workshop will give participants an introduction to the Narrative Interface and explore the basic functionality available through KBase: (a) creating a KBase account (b) assembling and annotating microbial genomes (c) comparative analysis of target organisms (d) building single organism and microbial community metabolic models (e) model refinement and evaluation strategies. The organizers of this workshop are involved in the development and application of KBase to answer questions in microbial ecology.