The QIIME 2 2024.5 release is now available! 
Thanks to everyone involved for their hard work! 
Following this release, we are transitioning to a twice-per-year release schedule where releases are scheduled for the first Wednesday of April and October. Our next planned QIIME 2 release is therefore scheduled for Oct. 2nd (QIIME 2 2024.10), but please stay tuned for updates. 
Between releases, you can access and install the most recent development version of QIIME 2 through our weekly builds 
You can find information on how to install these in the Set up your development environment document in Developing with QIIME 2 
The QIIME 2 2024.5 docs will be available shortly - we will follow up here once they have been published! 
Once they are available, you can refer to them for details on installing the latest QIIME 2 release, as well as tutorials and other resources. Get in touch on the QIIME 2 Forum if you run into any issues! 
Important: Interface Changes in QIIME 2 2024.5
In the 2024.5 release, the following interface changes have gone into effect:
- The supported Python version as of this release is Python 3.9. For the most part this doesn't impact users, but classifiers that worked with previous versions of QIIME 2 will not work with QIIME 2 2024.5. You can download new pre-trained classifiers on the new QIIME 2 Resources page. This is a result of the scikit-learn dependency version changing.
- The
decontam-removeAction in q2-quality-control now requires an additional parameter and generates an additional output. This integrates filtering of contaminant sequences from an inputFeatureData[Sequence]artifact, in addition to filtering their entries from the inputFeatureTable. @gregcaporaso decided to allow this interface change without advance warning as it's relatively new functionality so not yet widely used, it's a feature addition (opposed to a feature subtraction), and the best alternative would have involved multiple interface changes in the next release. - The
classify-sklearnaction inq2-feature-classifierno longer supports passing n cores/processes less than the total number possible to the--p-n-jobsparameter. This was a bug introduced by the last release and thus no warning of the change was made at the time.
Here are the highlights of the release:
@Oddant1 completely rewrote QIIME 2 View to enable us to more quickly integrate changes and improvements! 
Some new features include:
- A dynamic visualization gallery. Have you developed a cool new visualization for your QIIME 2 plugin that you think others should see? Add it to the gallery!
- Improved viewing of Collections in data provenance (though this is still a work in progress.)
- Switching between tabs will no longer reset the state of the other tabs. If you set up your visualization to look just how you want it then click away to another tab when you come back your visualization will still look how you had it.
- The citations on the Details page now have several options for different citation styles.
- Docker images are now being made available for all of our supported distributions!
- The docker images for
tiny,ampliconandmetagenomedistros have been built and are available for use!
Note: Please refer to our Docker instructions for distribution-specific install information
- The docker images for
- @Sann5 fixed a
which caused composite semantic types in TypeMapto not allow for child types to have properties
- @Oddant1 added
Collection[Visualization]as a valid output type - which was necessary for a new QIIME 2 community plugin: q2-boots
Interface Updates 
- @colinvwood added R usage drivers
- @Oddant1 updated artifact cache keys to accept kebab case
- @AmandaBirmingham integrated CWL support in q2dataflow and added collections support for both WDL and CWL
- @Oddant1 refactored our galaxy tools implementation with improved error handling
Plugin Updates 
- @colinbrislawn and @lizgehret fixed a
in ANCOM-BC that caused failures for sample IDs with exponent formatting (i.e 12e6). Thank you to forum user @luvalli for bringing this one to our attention! 
- @jphagen added improved error handling to describe too few samples retained in
alpha-group-significance
- @jphagen added an action for filtering
FeatureData[AlphaDiversity]
- @cherman2 fixed a
in beta-correlationwhere the metadata and distance matrix axes were incorrectly labeled
- @cherman2 @jphagen @lizgehret hardcoded scikit-bio alpha diversity metrics to produce NaN over 0 if metric assumptions are not met. This is a temporarily work-around while we communicate with scikit-bio about how this situation is handled
- @isaiah-ghost fixed a
in summarizewhere sample IDs were being replaced with a numerical index within the per-sample counts tab
- @Oddant1 refactored
summarizeto ensure consistent table formatting, and improved code for future development
- @jphagen added more verbose error handling for metadata merge methods
- @gregcaporaso @jordenrabasco added functionality to
decontam-removewhich allows users to remove contaminant identified sequences from the representative sequences object created from q2-dada2
- @jordenrabasco added a variety of new features to
decontam-score-viz, including an updated look, a sortable decontam score table with associated sequences, and downloadable fasta files of the contaminant and non-contaminant features
- @cherman2 refactored
GroupDisttoDist1Dand added new subtypes forDist1D:NestedOrderedandNestedUnordered
- @jphagen and @cherman2 added
FeatureTable[PresenceAbsence]as an accepted input fortaxa filter-table
- @jphagen migrated types/formats/transformers from q2-demux to q2-types for more general access
- @Oddant1 fixed a bug where types were no longer recognized after making dev in an environment
- @ebolyen fixed some circular import in bowtie and contig
- @misialq added a new type
FeatureData[Contig] - @misialq added
sample_dictmethod toMultiFASTADirectoryFormat - @misialq added two Eggnog annotation transformers. Eggnog annotations can now be transformed to
metadataandpd.Dataframe
- @Sann5 adjusted regex for genome data semantic types:
GenomeData[Loci],GenomeData[Genes], andGenomeData[Proteins]
- @misialq added new semantic types
FeatureData[SingleBowtie2Index]andFeatureData[AlignmentMap]
- @Vinzent_Risch added a new type
FeatureData[SequenceCharacteristics]and
a new semantic validator forFeatureData[SequenceCharacteristics % Properties("length")]
- @colinvwood added a transformer from
BIOMV210FormattoDNAFASTAFormatwhich allows biom tables whose observations (features) are annotated with their sequences to be imported asFeatureData[Sequence]
Documentation Updates 
- @gregcaporaso updated the documentation for Developing with QIIME 2. If you would like to learn more, please see the announcement for these changes here.
- @Oddant1 refactored the data resources page. As of 2024.5, pre-trained taxonomic classifiers are now available at https://resources.qiime2.org. This decouples these links from the documentation, and enables easier updating of these links between releases (e.g., we don't have to rebuild the docs to share new classifiers).
- @gregcaporaso added clearer documentation regarding community contributions to QIIME 2
- @colinvwood updated the cancer-microbiome-tutorial to illustrate how to use QIIME 2 with R.
- @lizgehret added updates to the home and about pages to reflect our current plans for library, and to clarify the guarantees that we make for community plugins and their usability
