Launching CAMI III Challenges - CAMI III Longitudinal Human Gut Data Online!

[MICROBIOME COSI]

Hello MICROBIOME COSI,

we are excited to announce the start of the third round of challenges of the Initiative for the Critical Assessment of Metagenome Interpretation (CAMI). The first CAMI III challenge dataset, called CAMI III Longitudinal Human Gut, is now available at www.cami-challenge.org/datasets. It is based on a longitudinal study of stool microbiota from nine individuals, comprising four stool metagenome samples per individual. Both short- and long-read shotgun metagenomic data representative of current sequencing technologies are provided. Unlike the toy dataset, the Longitudinal Human Gut challenge dataset includes novel microbial genomes, while continuing to cover taxa from multiple domains, such as bacteria, archaea, fungi, viruses, plasmids and host.

Timeline

The CAMI III Longitudinal Human Gut challenges - metagenome assembly, taxonomic profiling, taxonomic or genome binning of raw read data - start on July 14th, 2026. The assembly challenge will close on October 14th, 2026. For taxonomic profiling, taxonomic or genome binning methods using assembled data, assemblies will be provided on October 15th, 2026. All other challenges on this dataset close on January 31st, 2027.

Additional challenge datasets will be released throughout the challenge period.

For the full announcement and details, visit https://cami-challenge.org/cami-iii-challenges

We look forward to your submissions!

The CAMI Team