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Main Authors: Chen, Ricky X. F., Reidys, Christian M., Waterman, Michael S.
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.06220
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author Chen, Ricky X. F.
Reidys, Christian M.
Waterman, Michael S.
author_facet Chen, Ricky X. F.
Reidys, Christian M.
Waterman, Michael S.
contents Enumerative studies of RNA secondary structures were initiated four decades ago by Waterman and his coworkers. Since then, RNA secondary structures have been explored according to many different structural characteristics, for instance, helices, components and loops by Hofacker, Schuster and Stadler, orders by Nebel, saturated structures by Clote, the $5^{\prime}$-$3^{\prime}$ end distance by Clote, Ponty and Steyaert, and the rainbow spectrum by Li and Reidys. However, the majority of the contributions are asymptotic results, and it is harder to derive explicit formulas. In this paper, we obtain exact formulas counting RNA secondary structures with a given number of helices as well as a given joint size distribution of helices and loops, while some related asymptotic results due to Hofacker, Schuster and Stadler have been known for about twenty years. Our approach is combinatorial, analyzing a recent bijection between RNA secondary structures and plane trees discovered by the first author and proposing a variation of Chen's bijective approach of counting trees by forests of simple trees.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2407_06220
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Exact enumeration of RNA secondary structures by helices and loops
Chen, Ricky X. F.
Reidys, Christian M.
Waterman, Michael S.
Combinatorics
92B05, 05C05, 05A15
Enumerative studies of RNA secondary structures were initiated four decades ago by Waterman and his coworkers. Since then, RNA secondary structures have been explored according to many different structural characteristics, for instance, helices, components and loops by Hofacker, Schuster and Stadler, orders by Nebel, saturated structures by Clote, the $5^{\prime}$-$3^{\prime}$ end distance by Clote, Ponty and Steyaert, and the rainbow spectrum by Li and Reidys. However, the majority of the contributions are asymptotic results, and it is harder to derive explicit formulas. In this paper, we obtain exact formulas counting RNA secondary structures with a given number of helices as well as a given joint size distribution of helices and loops, while some related asymptotic results due to Hofacker, Schuster and Stadler have been known for about twenty years. Our approach is combinatorial, analyzing a recent bijection between RNA secondary structures and plane trees discovered by the first author and proposing a variation of Chen's bijective approach of counting trees by forests of simple trees.
title Exact enumeration of RNA secondary structures by helices and loops
topic Combinatorics
92B05, 05C05, 05A15
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.06220