Recent technological advances in genomics, proteomics and bioinformatics have offered new insights into the molecular mechanisms that underlie lymphocyte signaling and function, and the development of new tools in these areas has opened up new avenues for biological investigation. By adding a quantitative dimension to lymphocyte proteome profiling, molecular machines and spatiotemporal regulatory processes can now be analyzed using such discovery-driven approaches. Biologists employing genomic and proteomic tools are gathering data at increasing speed and their struggle to extract maximal biological information is helped by new software tools that enable the detailed comparison of multiple datasets.