Abstract
The chicken B cell line DT40 is a tool that is uniquely situated to study the function of genes due to its high rate of homologous recombination. As any tool is only as good as the resources behind it, the recent boon and continuing output of available genomic information has only widened the possibilities for the DT40 community. Besides the release of the chicken genome, the public databases are expanding rapidly with a wealth of experimentally produced data including various chicken cell specific EST's, full-length cDNA's, non-coding RNA's and expressed SAGE tags. In addition, many laboratories have also taken it upon themselves to set up a web presence freely sharing and distributing information, program applications and software such as the DT40 website. Of course, the standard bearers in this are the institutes that have led the way in development of bioinformatics tools for sequence information, comparative genomics and proteomics such as The National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI), The European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL), The DNA Database of Japan (DDBJ) and The Molecular Biology Server-Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics (ExPASy). These resources for virtual science can not replace the hands in the lab, but they can help at every turn along the path to discovery.