The Eukaryotic Linear Motif (ELM) resource is a
computational biology resource (developed at the
European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL)) for investigating
short linear motifs (SLiMs) in
eukaryotic
The eukaryotes ( ) constitute the Domain (biology), domain of Eukaryota or Eukarya, organisms whose Cell (biology), cells have a membrane-bound cell nucleus, nucleus. All animals, plants, Fungus, fungi, seaweeds, and many unicellular organisms ...
protein
Proteins are large biomolecules and macromolecules that comprise one or more long chains of amino acid residue (biochemistry), residues. Proteins perform a vast array of functions within organisms, including Enzyme catalysis, catalysing metab ...
s.
It is currently the largest collection of linear motif classes with
annotated
An annotation is extra information associated with a particular point in a document or other piece of information. It can be a note that includes a comment or explanation. Annotations are sometimes presented in the margin of book pages. For anno ...
and experimentally validated linear motif instances.
Linear motifs are specified as
pattern
A pattern is a regularity in the world, in human-made design, or in abstract ideas. As such, the elements of a pattern repeat in a predictable manner. A geometric pattern is a kind of pattern formed of geometric shapes and typically repeated l ...
s using
regular expression
A regular expression (shortened as regex or regexp), sometimes referred to as rational expression, is a sequence of characters that specifies a match pattern in text. Usually such patterns are used by string-searching algorithms for "find" ...
rules. These expressions are used in the ELM prediction pipeline which detects putative motif instances in protein sequences.
To improve the predictive power, context-based rules and logical filters are being developed and
applied to reduce the amount of
false positives matches.
As of 2010 ELM contained 146 different motifs that annotate more than 1300 experimentally determined instances within proteins.
The current version of the ELM server provides filtering by cell compartment, phylogeny, globular domain clash (using the
SMART/
Pfam databases) and structure.
In addition, both the known ELM instances and any positionally conserved matches in sequences similar to ELM instance sequences are identified and displayed.
See also
*
Phospho.ELM
*
Minimotif miner
References
{{reflist
External links
ELMhome page
Protein databases
Protein domains
Protein structural motifs