Deep multi-label joint learning for RNA and DNA-binding proteins prediction

The recognition of DNA- (DBPs) and RNA-binding proteins (RBPs) is not only conducive to understanding cell function, but also a challenging task. Previous studies have shown that these proteins are usually considered separately due to different binding domains. In addition, due to the high similarity between DBPs and RBPs, it is possible for DBPs predictor to predict RBPs as DBPs, and vice versa, which leads to high cross-prediction rate. In this study, we creatively propose a novel deep multi-label joint learning framework to leverage the relationship between multiple labels and binding proteins. First, a multi-label variant network is designed to explore multi-scale context hidden information. Then, multi-label Long Short-Term Memory (multiLSTM) is used to mine the potential relationship between labels. Finally, the calibrated hidden features from variant network are considered for different levels of joint learning so that multiLSTM can better explore the correlation between them. Extensive experiments are also carried out to compare the proposed method with other existing methods. Furthermore, we also provide further insights into the importance of the relevant bioanalysis of proteins obtained from our model and summarize these binding proteins that are significantly related to a disease. Our method is freely available at http://39.108.90.186/dmlj.