A visual representation for RNA secondary structure and its application

The graphical representation of biological sequences is an important subject in the area of genome studies. We propose a novel visual representation for RNA secondary structures. Some symmetric properties and information on the base distribution and compositions can be intuitively reflected by the projection graphs of the points corresponding to the RNA secondary structures. Then our method is applied to compute the similarity of 12 classical samples and 11 real RNA secondary structures. The results indicate that our method can not only effectively analyze the similarity between RNA secondary structures but also show a high consistency with other literatures. Moreover, our method only needs the geometrical center of the characteristic curve of the RNA secondary structure to compute the similarity matrix, which means a low computational complexity. © 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Int J Quantum Chem, 2011