RPINBASE: An online toolbox to extract features for predicting RNA-protein interactions

Feature extraction is one of the most important preprocessing steps in predicting the interactions between RNAs and proteins by applying machine learning approaches. Despite many efforts in this area, still, no suitable structural feature extraction tool has been designed. Therefore, an online toolbox, named RPINBASE which can be applied to different scopes of biological applications, is introduced in this paper. This toolbox employs efficient nested queries that enhance the speed of the requests and produces desired features in the form of positive and negative samples. To show the capabilities of the proposed toolbox, the developed toolbox was investigated in the aptamer design problem, and the obtained results are discussed. RPINBASE is an online toolbox and is accessible at http://rpinbase.com.