Last year, FlyBase launched a new resource, the Frequently Used GAL4 Drivers table. In this table, we have included the Drosophila research community’s most popular GAL4 drivers, defined as being among the Bloomington Drosophila Stock Center’s 150 most-ordered GAL4 stocks, or by having been curated to more than 20 research papers by a FlyBase curator. The table does not display the complete expression pattern of each driver; the displayed patterns are deliberately biased to reflect how each driver is being used by the community as a research tool. We will soon be enhancing this resource with representative images of each GAL4 driver’s expression patterns, starting with published images from papers distributed using the Creative Commons Attribution License, or for which we have obtained permission to use.

FlyBase would like your feedback to help us improve this resource. We have added a dedicated Contact FlyBase link to the top of the Frequently Used GAL4 Drivers page; this link reaches the FlyBase curators who curate expression pattern data.

Are you using a GAL4 driver included in the table in a tissue or at a stage not documented in the table? We’d like to hear about it! For example, we suspect many drivers expressed at both larval and adult stages are also expressed during P-stage (prepupal, pupal, and pharate adult) stages, but that this often isn’t mentioned in the literature. Do you have a nice unpublished image of a GAL4 expression pattern sitting on your hard drive? We’d love for you to send it to us (we will, of course, credit you)! It’s surprisingly hard to find images for which we have permission for some of the most common drivers. Is there a GAL4 driver you think should be in this table that we’ve missed? Please tell us! Do you have a comment or suggestion to make the resource better and more useful? Send that thought straight to the people who make this table happen.