EPIC is open

The EPIC (Eukaryotic Promoter and transcription Initiation prediction Challenge) opens today, 4 September 2026. EPIC is a community benchmark for predicting genome-wide Pol II transcription initiation from DNA sequence alone, intended to provide a rigorous evaluation of promoter and initiation models in understudied eukaryotes.

Participants train on experimental csRNA-seq from five non-model animal species and submit predictions for held-out genomic regions. Submissions are scored against withheld measurements using classification and correlation-based metrics. Genomes and training data are available on Zenodo: doi:10.5281/zenodo.22285753. Species, scoring, and rules are described in the Docs.

Teams may register by signing in with GitHub (1–10 members) and upload .txt.gz submissions from the Submissions page. The primary deadline is 30 November 2026. Teams that beat the baseline are invited to EPIC consortium authorship on the post-challenge paper.