The importance of the short linear motifs in virus-host interactions makes the ELM resource an important tool for the viral research community. For example, Cruz et al. (26) analyzed a protein phosphatase 1 (PP1) docking motif in 'protein 7' of transmissible gastroenteritis virus using the ELM class LIG_PP1. This conserved sequence motif mediates binding to the PP1 catalytic subunit, a key regulator of the cellular antiviral defense mechanisms, and is also found in other viral proteomes, suggesting that it might be a recurring strategy to counteract the hosts' defense against RNA viruses by dephosphorylating eukaryotic translation initiation factor 2a and ultimately ribonuclease L. To reflect our increasing awareness of viral motifs (8), special focus has been attributed to the annotation of viral instances in the ELM database: in the latest release, more than 200 novel ELM instances found in 84 different viral taxons have been added. The notion of viruses abusing existing SLiMs in their hosts is demonstrated by viral instances being annotated alongside instances in their hosts' proteins. For example, the ELM class LIG_PDZ_Class_1 contains 12 instances in human proteins but has recently been expanded with 5 instances from 5 different human pathogenic virus proteins. . ELM instances browse page. A full-text search (here, search term used was 'AP2', filtering for 'true positive' instances in taxon 'Homo sapiens', yielding 58 instances) assists in finding annotated instances. A search can be restricted to a particular taxonomy or instance logic (top) or ELM class type (buttons on the left). The list can also be exported to TSV or FASTA format for further processing.