How can you find genes when you don't quite know their names/symbols in FlyBase?

When you use QuickSearch you can add the asterisk character * to the beginning or the end of a search term. This is recognised as a wild card and will find all terms that contain your search term at the beginning or end of a "word" respectively. You can also flank your search term with wild card characters to find all terms containing your search term. For example, you can find the genes that start with ft by entering ft*. The result of this search lists as you would expect fat (ft) and fushi tarazu (ftz), which you can see if you press "Show all hits", as well as fruitless (fru), because it is has the synonym fty.

The use of wild cards is not limited to genes. Searching stocks data for *bxd* will find stocks that carry either aberrations or alleles that include bxd in the genotype. If you are interested in GAL4 or GFP lines select the data class "stocks" and enter the search term surrounded by wild card characters, for example *GFP*. In fact, we recommend using wild card characters here because often the search term may be part of a more complex term such as P{w[+mC]=UAS-GFP.nls}8.