Pass each element of a list to a function that takes multiple arguments in Python?

For example, if I have

a=[['a','b','c'],[1,2,3],['d','e','f'],[4,5,6]]

How can I get each element 开发者_StackOverflow社区of a to be an argument of say, zip without having to type

zip(a[0],a[1],a[2],a[3])?

Using sequence unpacking (thanks to delnan for the name):

zip(*a)

Chain()?

http://docs.python.org/library/itertools.html#itertools.chain

nm, read it wrong. That won't work.