The Eukaryotic Linear Motif (ELM) resource is a computational biology resource

Biological database

Biological databases are libraries of life sciences information, collected from scientific experiments, published literature, high-throughput experiment technology, and computational analyses. They contain information from research areas including genomics, proteomics, metabolomics, microarray...

 (developed at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory

European Molecular Biology Laboratory

The European Molecular Biology Laboratory is a molecular biology research institution supported by 20 European countries and Australia as associate member state. EMBL was created in 1974 and is an intergovernmental organisation funded by public research money from its member states...

 (EMBL)) for investigating short linear motif

Short linear motif

In molecular biology Short Linear Motifs are short stretches of protein sequence that mediate protein protein interaction.The first definition was given by Tim Hunt:...

s (SLiMs) in eukaryotic

Eukaryote

A eukaryote is an organism whose cells contain complex structures enclosed within membranes. Eukaryotes may more formally be referred to as the taxon Eukarya or Eukaryota. The defining membrane-bound structure that sets eukaryotic cells apart from prokaryotic cells is the nucleus, or nuclear...

 protein

Protein

Proteins are biochemical compounds consisting of one or more polypeptides typically folded into a globular or fibrous form, facilitating a biological function. A polypeptide is a single linear polymer chain of amino acids bonded together by peptide bonds between the carboxyl and amino groups of...

s. It is currently the largest collection of linear motif classes with annotated

Annotation

An annotation is a note that is made while reading any form of text. This may be as simple as underlining or highlighting passages.Annotated bibliographies give descriptions about how each source is useful to an author in constructing a paper or argument...

 and experimentally validated linear motif instances.

Linear motifs are specified as pattern

Pattern

A pattern, from the French patron, is a type of theme of recurring events or objects, sometimes referred to as elements of a set of objects.These elements repeat in a predictable manner...

s using regular expression

Regular expression

In computing, a regular expression provides a concise and flexible means for "matching" strings of text, such as particular characters, words, or patterns of characters. Abbreviations for "regular expression" include "regex" and "regexp"...

 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

Simple Modular Architecture Research Tool

Simple Modular Architecture Research Tool is a classification scheme used in the identification and analysis of protein domains....

/Pfam

Pfam

Pfam is a database of protein families that includes their annotations and multiple sequence alignments generated using hidden Markov models.- Features :For each family in Pfam one can:* Look at multiple alignments* View protein domain architectures...

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.