Advancement of next generation sequencing and high-throughput technologies has resulted in generation of multi-level of 'OMICS' data for many organisms. However, these data are often individually scattered across different repositories based on data type, making it difficult to integrate them. A hallmark of modern biology is tremendous amounts of complex omics data, which require large-scale data management, comprehensive computational analyses, and efficient integration, for better understanding of the data and hypothesis generation. For most biological organisms ranging from plants to animals to viruses and bacteria with sequenced genomes, there is an increasing need for the community to have a one-stop interactive, web-based portal to browse, access, analyze, integrate and share knowledge about genomics and molecular mechanisms, with ultimate links to phenotypes and traits.

Towards this, we have expanded our in-house developed Soybean Knowledge Base (SoyKB), a comprehensive all-inclusive web resource for soybean to other organisms via Knowledge Base Commons (KBCommons) without the need for reinventing the wheel.

KBCommons, is a platform that automates the process of establishing the database and making the suite of informatics tools and visualization capability easily available for other organisms via a dedicated web resource. It provides information for six entities including genes/proteins, microRNAs/sRNAs, metabolites, SNP, traits as well as plant introduction or strains/populations. It also incorporate several multi-omics datasets including transcriptomics, proteomics, metabolomics, epigenomics, molecular breeding, phenotype and other types.

KBCommons also provides a suite of tools such as the gene/metabolite pathway viewer, Protein Bio-Viewer, 3D protein structure viewer, heatmaps, scatter plots and hierarchical clustering. KBCommons also has suite for differential expression analysis of omics datasets including venn diagrams, volcano plots, function enrichment and gene modules. It will also incorporate access to Pegasus analytics workflows for analysis in future.

KBCommons provides an informatics-based social network system to build connections among scientists, researchers, producers and consumers.