FlyBase is pleased to announce the release of our new QuickSearch tool. In this redesign of our most popular tool, we have separated specific types of searches into 'tabs', arrayed at the top of the QuickSearch window. This tabbed organization has allowed us to make each search form clearer, and in most tabs we have been able to add extra functionality. Please let us know what you think.

The current tabs offered include 'Simple', 'Expression', 'Phenotype', 'GO', 'References' and 'Data Type'. The Simple tab performs a global search that combs all the FlyBase data records that can be text-searched and returns a result page summarizing how many records of each FlyBase data type matched the search phrase. The user may then click on one of these data types to see a table of individual matches in that data type, or s/he may edit the phrase and search again.

The 'Expression' tab searches either expression data curated from literature or high throughput expression data from the modENCODE project.

The 'Phenotype' tab searches for alleles that have particular phenotypes. The form is divided into two portions, which may be used independently or in combination. The coordinated auto-completion feature will assist you in finding the appropriate controlled vocabulary (CV) terms that have been used during the curation of each phenotype.

The 'GO' tab searches Gene Ontology terms in FlyBase. This is useful when you want to search for genes that are known to have a specific molecular function, are involved in a certain biological process or located in a particular subcellular location. The result from this search is a TermLink report, which contains the term definition, links to gene records annotated with that term or one of its children and an ontology tree that shows the nearest parent and child terms.

The 'References' tab offers a search of the extensive FlyBase bibliography. This form now allows searches filtered by title/abstract text, publication name, publication type, and reference IDs (PubMed or FlyBase), in addition to the author and date filters.

The 'Data Type' search tab form contains a trimmed-down version of the previous QuickSearch form. The lengthy drop-down menu of data classes has been shortened considerably, with many of the data classes now having their own tabs, but the behavior of the search in this tab is otherwise largely unchanged. Here you can search the various data classes in the FlyBase database, such as stocks, gene associations, sequence features or aberrations.

Additional information about this new search can be found on our QuickSearch Help page located in the top right of the QuickSearch form on the front page.