ZeRPI: A graph neural network model for zero-shot prediction of RNA-protein interactions

RNA-protein interactions are crucial for biological functions across multiple levels. RNA binding proteins (RBPs) intricately engage in diverse biological processes through specific RNA molecule interactions. Previous studies have revealed the indispensable role of RBPs in both health and disease development. With the increase of experimental data, machine-learning methods have been widely used to predict RNA-protein interactions. However, most current methods either train models for individual RBPs or develop multi-task models for a fixed set of multiple RBPs. These approaches are incapable of predicting interactions with previously unseen RBPs. In this study, we present ZeRPI, a zero-shot method for predicting RNA-protein interactions. Based on a graph neural network model, ZeRPI integrates RNA and protein information to generate detailed representations, using a novel loss function based on contrastive learning principles to augment the alignment between interacting pairs in feature space. ZeRPI demonstrates competitive performance in predicting RNA-protein interactions across a wide array of RBPs. Notably, our model exhibits remarkable versatility in accurately predicting interactions for unseen RBPs, demonstrating its capacity to transfer knowledge learned from known RBPs.