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.