The UCSC Genome Browser: What Every Molecular Biologist Should Know

Electronic data resources can enable molecular biologists to quickly get information from around the world that a decade ago would have been buried in papers scattered throughout the library. The ability to access, query, and display these data makes benchwork much more efficient and drives new discoveries. Increasingly, mastery of software resources and corresponding data repositories is required to fully explore the volume of data generated in biomedical and agricultural research, because only small amounts of data are actually found in traditional publications. The UCSC Genome Browser provides a wealth of data and tools that advance understanding of genomic context for many species, enable detailed analysis of data, and provide the ability to interrogate regions of interest across disparate data sets from a wide variety of sources. Researchers can also supplement the standard display with their own data to query and share this with others. Effective use of these resources has become crucial to biological research today, and this unit describes some practical applications of the UCSC Genome Browser.