Eukaryotic Linear Motif Resource for Functional Sites in Proteins

Reflecting the modular nature of eukaryotic proteins, several WWW servers (e.g. PFAM, SMART, PROSITE) are dedicated to revealing domains in proteins. These servers have become indispensable bioinformatics tools. However, there is no resource, which specifically focuses on functional sites, such as targeting peptides, docking modules, cleavable sites, and post-translational modification sites. Yet, these modules are just as important for function as the larger protein domains. The reason there are no such good tools is that the motifs describing functional sites are so short that they will result in severe over-prediction. The ELM Consortium will address this deficiency by creating and applying the Eukaryotic Linear Motif resource (ELM), a comprehensive informatics resource for evaluating functional sites in eukaryotic proteins using context based rules to reduce or eliminate false positives. ELM will be Internet accessible and available as a package for automated genome analysis pipelines and in-house server setup.