The conservation of linear motifs can help in assessing the functional relevance of putative instances, with functional instances showing higher overall sequence conservation than non-functional ones (21) . Therefore, sequence conservation of the query protein is calculated using a tree-based conservation scoring method (22) and highlighted in the graphical output. Here, lighter shades of blue represent low conservation while dark blue shading corresponds to high-sequence conservation. The actual conservation score can be inspected by moving the mouse over the respective ELM instance (Figure 2) .