Abstract:

The primary structure of RNA is a long word in the alphabet of nucleotides {A,C,G,U}. Unlike its double helix cousin DNA, RNA's nucleotides are not automatically paired with their complements. Instead a strand of RNA fold on itself into a secondary structure, with many, but not all, nucleotides pairing. This secondary structure can be represented as a plane tree. We will see how all of these plane trees relate to each other in a graph, and learn about the properties of that graph. This talk is appropriate for anyone who knows the definition of a graph <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graph_theory#Graph>.