FlyBase is pleased to introduce 'Experimental Tool' reports, which will help you to easily find transgenic constructs with particular characteristics. Reports have been generated for commonly used sequences with useful properties that are exploited to study the biological function of another gene product or a biological process. These include tools that enable a gene product to be detected (e.g. the FLAG tag, EGFP, mCherry), target a gene product somewhere specific within a cell (e.g. nuclear localisation signal, signal sequence), drive expression in a binary system (e.g. UAS, GAL4) or enable clonal/conditional expression (e.g. FLP, FRT). Each Experimental Tool report provides a description of the tool and its uses, together with browsable tables of transgenic constructs that encode or carry that tool. The tables list the construct components (e.g. regulatory region, encoded product) in separate columns and links are provided to stocks, so that researchers can easily identify constructs and fly stocks that they are interested in.

Searching for tools

You can search for a tool by typing its name (e.g. GAL4, mCherry, FRT) into the 'Search FlyBase' box on the home page.

You can also use the Vocabularies tool to browse the current range of terms that we are using to describe how experimental tools can be used. The Annotations section near the top of each Term Report provides a link to a histlist of the relevant tools.

Over the coming months we plan to broaden the range of Experimental Tool reports to include optogenetic tools that are used to manipulate the activity of neurons. We welcome feedback on other types of tool that you think would be useful to add.