Compete in GHIST - the Genomic History Inference Strategies Tournament

[Ryan N Gutenkunst]

Hello fastsimcoal2 users!

The 2025 Genomic History Inference Strategies Tournament (GHIST) is live at https://ghi.st !

There are many ways to infer population history, natural selection, or other evolutionary properties from genomic data, and it is often unclear which methods work best for which tasks. GHIST is an annual forum for the community to test inference approaches in an unbiased fashion. Each year, the GHIST organizers release simulated population genomic data sets and host a competition to infer various aspects of the processes that generated those data. From the submissions, the community will learn what approaches perform well or poorly in particular circumstances. And it is a great training opportunity! Top competitors will be invited as coauthors on the publication describing the year’s competition and earn cash prizes.

This year, GHIST consists of 5 demographic history inference challenges and 4 selective sweep detection challenges. You can use whatever approach you prefer to tackle each challenge. The competition will close November 14, 2025. So there is plenty of time, including for new trainees who start this semester.

To help you get started, we’ve created web apps to help you fit bottleneck demographic histories or detect sweeps. Find those on our webpage: https://ghi.st . You can also read about the 2024 competition in our bioRxiv preprint: https://doi.org/10.1101/2025.08.05.668560  .

For questions, please contact Ryan Gutenkunst <rgu...@arizona.edu>.

Thanks,
Ryan

P.S. Thank you to Laurent for permission to advertise to fastsimcoal2 users!

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Ryan Gutenkunst
Professor and Department Head, Molecular and Cellular Biology, University of Arizona
http://gutengroup.arizona.edu, (520) 626-0569, LSS 444A