FlyBase is pleased to offer a new resource, the Frequently Used GAL4 Drivers table. Here, we have compiled information for 200 GAL4 drivers, including the 150 stocks most ordered from the Bloomington Drosophila Stock Center, and those drivers most frequently used in publications. Links to publications and stocks are included in this table. This table can be accessed via a link on the GAL4 etc QuickSearch tab, and is also available as a downloadable file.

For each Driver, we have included expression pattern information. These patterns have been condensed from previously curated expressed patterns, and are biased towards common use of these drivers as experimental tools; the full curated expression patterns are available on the allele, transgenic construct, and/or insertion reports linked to each driver. We’ve listed FlyBase Anatomy Controlled Vocabulary terms in the “Major tissue” column; these are the terms you can use in searches to find other similarly-expressed GAL4 drivers using the GAL4 etc QuickSearch tab. The “Common terms” column includes non-controlled vocabulary words, such as “pan-neuronal”, often used in papers to describe expression patterns. We’ve included only top level stage terms in the “Major stage” column. Drivers that reflect the expression pattern of a particular gene have an entry in the “Assoc. gene” column.

It’s often said that a picture is worth a thousand words. We’d like to enhance this resource with representative images of the expression pattern of each GAL4 driver. We are soliciting images from you, the Drosophila research community. If you’d like to contribute a GAL4 image, please contact gal4@morgan.harvard.edu.