Rainbow trout sequences originating from INRA Agenae [24] and USDA [30] EST sequencing programs were used to generate publicly available contigs [31] . The 8th version (Om.8, released January 2006) was used for BlastX [32] comparison against the Swiss-Prot database (January 2006) [33] . The score of each alignment was retrieved after performing a BlastX comparison. In addition, for each EST spotted onto the membrane, the accession number of the corresponding rainbow trout cluster (Unigene Trout, January 2006), if any, was retrieved from the UniGene database [34] .