# GISTIC (copy number driver detection)

Source: https://onco.cc/terms/gistic/  
OnCo record `gistic` (Term). Data CC BY-NC 4.0, attribute "Data from OnCo (onco.cc)"; commercial use needs a licence.

## TL;DR

GISTIC scans copy number data across many tumours to find the regions that are amplified or deleted far more often than chance, the likely targets of selection.

## Summary

GISTIC2.0, from Mermel and colleagues at the Broad Institute, facilitates sensitive and confident localisation of the targets of focal somatic copy number alteration by scoring each genomic region on the frequency and amplitude of alteration across a cohort and assigning a false-discovery q-value; it distinguishes arm-level from focal events and reports peak regions. TCGA copy number papers report GISTIC peaks, and the gene-level thresholded calls (deep deletion, amplification) on cBioPortal come from it. The Broad distributes it under a research licence, so OnCo's open-source map lists it as skipped.

## Fields

- Kind: Term
- Last checked: 2026-09-24
- Also known as: GISTIC; GISTIC2; GISTIC2.0; GISTIC peaks; GISTIC score
- Tags: cansim-terms

## Notes

- Listed in the CanSim terms map 1.0.0 (docs/onco/terms.json, generated 2026-09-24), CC BY 4.0, attribution: CanSim project, an open, public-data-first cancer foundation-model programme; CanSim page path /terms/gistic.

## Sources

- GISTIC2 documentation (Broad Institute): https://broadinstitute.github.io/gistic2/
- Mermel et al., GISTIC2.0 (Genome Biology 2011): https://doi.org/10.1186/gb-2011-12-4-r41

## Connected records

- collections: [IntOGen](https://onco.cc/collections/intogen/)
- terms: [Cancer AI vocabulary (CanSim terms map)](https://onco.cc/terms/cancer-ai-vocabulary/), [Copy number alteration (CNA)](https://onco.cc/terms/copy-number-variation-term/), [MutSig (significantly mutated gene detection)](https://onco.cc/terms/mutsig/)

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