In this release, FlyBase has added some new features to the Frequently Used GAL4 Drivers table. First, we have added a new Images column, which contains representative image thumbnails for more than 80 GAL4 drivers, collected from publications distributed using the Creative Commons Attribution License. Clicking on a thumbnail results in a pop-up containing a large image, a citation of publication the image was taken from, and that publication’s DOI and FlyBase Reference report links.

This new feature, however, makes an already quite wide table even wider. We have added a “Show/Hide Columns” selector, allowing you to customize what you see in the table. You can now hide any column you find less useful, while the user who needs that column still has it. This feature also makes the Frequently Used GAL4 Drivers table easier to use on smaller mobile devices.

We've also added a text filter box to each column, to allow users to restrict the table to drivers of interest. If, for example, you want to find a driver expressed in the ellipsoid body, you can enter ‘ellipsoid body’ in the filter box of the ‘Major tissue’ column and restrict the table to the drivers including that as a tissue term.

While we’ve made a good start on locating images of wild-type GAL4 expression patterns, for many drivers, the available published images of a GAL4 driver are only of those driving another transgene to produce a mutant phenotype, or are driving a reporter in a mutant background. Many published figures use red and green markers in the same image, making them inaccessible to colorblind researchers. For other drivers, we were unable to find an available image illustrating the pattern described in the Frequently Used GAL4 table. We are therefore asking for help from you, FlyBase users, to get more and better images for this resource. Do you have a nice image of a wild-type control that you couldn’t fit into a paper? Have a beautiful figure from a poster? Or an unpublished image that better illustrates a GAL4 expression pattern than the image we’ve found? Are you teaching an undergraduate lab course in which your students producing images while learning a technique? We’d love to give your high-quality unpublished GAL4 image a home, and will credit it to you and/or your laboratory or research group.