LAUSR

MOTIVATION RNA-binding proteins (RBPs) play crucial roles in post-transcriptional regulation. Accurate identification of RBPs helps understand gene expression, regulation, etc. In recent years, some computational methods were proposed to identify RBPs. However, these methods fail to accurately identify RBPs from some specific species with limited data, such as bacteria. RESULTS In this study, we introduce a computational method called PreRBP-TL for identifying species-specific RBPs based on transfer learning. The weights of the prediction model were initialized by pre-training with the large general RBP dataset and then fine-tuned with the small species-specific RPB dataset by using transfer learning. The experimental results show that the PreRBP-TL achieves better performance for identifying the species-specific RBPs from Human, Arabidopsis, Escherichia coli, and Salmonella, outperforming eight state-of-the-art computational methods. It is anticipated PreRBP-TL will become a useful method for identifying RBPs. AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION For the convenience of researchers to identify RBPs, the web server of PreRBP-TL was established, freely available at http://bliulab.net/PreRBP-TL. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.