Abstract: In order to research the recognition method for E. coli promoter, an approach based on support vector machine combining with molecubiology theory of E. coli gene is applied to the recognition of E. coli promoter sequence. According to the sequence conservation, some sequences with 65 bases are selected as positive samples and some corresponding non-promoters from E. coli coding areas are selected as negative samples, and a classifier based on support vector machine is constructed. Finally, the selection of kernel function has been discussed. Results show that the SVM-based approach can extract the statistical characteristic of promoters more effectively and the correlation coefficient between positive and negative samples can reach 81.62%.