BioInfoBank Institute is a non-for-profit research
and development organization. The general objective
of the Institute is to generate, incubate and inspire
innovative ideas and to facilitate and promote
unrestricted and productive research conducted by
highly motivated excellent young scientists in
Poland. The Institute generates innovative
technological solutions. Some of them are converted
into commercial project ideas that can be
disseminated across the BioInfoBank network. The
institute not only educates experts in biotechnology
and information technology but also promotes
commercial exploitation of scientific discoveries by
their own authors through a spin-off program. The
main scientific focus of the institute is
Bioinformatics, an inter-disciplinary field of
science driven by achievements in biotechnology and
information technology. The institute is mainly funded by
Framework Grants from the European Commission and by
grants from the Foundation for Polish Science
and from the Polish Ministry of Science.
Linear motifs are short segments of multidomain proteins that provide regulatory functions independently of protein tertiary structure. Much of intracellular signalling passes through protein modifications at linear motifs. Many thousands of linear motif instances, most notably phosphorylation sites, have now been reported. Although clearly very abundant, linear motifs are difficult to predict de novo in protein sequences due to the difficulty of obtaining robust statistical assessments. The ELM resource at http://elm.eu.org/ provides an expanding knowledge base, currently covering 146 known motifs, with annotation that includes >1300 experimentally reported instances. ELM is also an exploratory tool for suggesting new candidates of known linear motifs in proteins of interest. Information about protein domains, protein structure and native disorder, cellular and taxonomic contexts is used to reduce or deprecate false positive matches. Results are graphically displayed in a 'Bar Code' format, which also displays known instances from homologous proteins through a novel 'Instance Mapper' protocol based on PHI-BLAST. ELM server output provides links to the ELM annotation as well as to a number of remote resources. Using the links, researchers can explore the motifs, proteins, complex structures and associated literature to evaluate whether candidate motifs might be worth experimental investigation.
Nucleic Acids Res. 2010 Jan;38(Database issue):D167-80.
