A new family of metrics for biopolymer contact structures
Contact structures are simplified representations of biopolymers' three-dimensional structures. In this paper we introduce a new family of metrics (d(m))(mgreater than or equal to3) for contact structures of a fixed length, based on their representation by means of edge ideals of a polynomial ring, that generalize Reidys and Stadler's subgroup metric for RNA secondary structures. We study some abstract properties of these metrics, and we obtain explicit descriptions of them for some values of m. (C) 2003 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
metric contact structure edge ideal rna secondary structure distance