The identification of RBSs is used to determine the site of translation initiation in an unannotated sequence. This is referred to as N-terminal prediction. This is especially useful when multiple start codons are situated around the potential start site of the protein coding sequence.
Identification of RBSs is particularly difficult, because they tend to be highly degenerated. One approach to identifying RBS in E.coli is using neural networks. Another approach is using the Gibbs sampling method.