Combinatorial insights into RNA secondary structure

Abstract

The interaction of discretemathematics with molecular biology advances our understanding of important sequence/structure/function relationships. By their nature, biological sequences are often abstracted to combinatorial objects namely strings over finite alphabets and their representation as graphs or formal languages. As described in this chapter, results based on these mathematical abstractions have been used to count, compare, classify, and otherwise analyze RNA secondary structures. In this way, they provide important insights into the base pairing of RNA sequences, thereby advancing our understanding of RNA folding.