LIRcentral: a manually curated online database of experimentally validated functional LIR-motifs
Several selective macroautophagy receptor and adaptor proteins bind members of the Autophagy-related protein 8 (Atg8) family using short linear motifs (SLiMs), most often referred to as Atg8-interacting motifs (AIM) or LC3-interacting motifs (LIR). AIM/LIR-motifs have been extensively studied during the last fifteen years, since they can uncover the underlying biological mechanisms and possible substrates for this key catabolic process of eukaryotic cells. Prompted by the fact that experimental information regarding LIR-motifs can be found scattered across heterogeneous literature resources, we have developed LIRcentral (https://lircentral.eu), a freely available online repository for user-friendly access to comprehensive, high-quality information regarding LIR-motifs from manually curated publications. Herein, we describe the development of LIRcentral and showcase currently available data and features, along with our plans for the expansion of this resource. Information incorporated in LIRcentral is useful for accomplishing a variety of research tasks, including: (i) guiding wet biology researchers for the characterization of novel instances of LIR-motifs, (ii) giving bioinformaticians/computational biologists access to high-quality LIR-motifs for building novel prediction methods for LIR-motifs and LIR containing proteins (LIRCPs) and (iii) performing analyses to better understand the biological importance/features of functional LIR-motifs. We welcome feedback on the LIRcentral content and functionality by all interested researchers and anticipate this work to spearhead a community effort for sustaining this resource which will further promote progress in studying LIR-motifs/LIRCPs.