Asymptotics of Canonical and Saturated RNA Secondary Structures

It is a classical result of Stein and Waterman that the asymptotic number of RNA secondary structures is $1.104366 n^{-3/2} 2.618034^n$. In this paper, we study combinatorial asymptotics for two special subclasses of RNA secondary structures - canonical and saturated structures. Canonical secondary structures were introduced by Bompf\"unewerer et al., who noted that the run time of Vienna RNA Package is substantially reduced when restricting computations to canonical structures. Here we provide an explanation for the speed-up. Saturated secondary structures have the property that no base pairs can be added without violating the definition of secondary structure (i.e. introducing a pseudoknot or base triple). Here we compute the asymptotic number of saturated structures, we show that the asymptotic expected number of base pairs is $0.337361 n$, and the asymptotic number of saturated stem-loop structures is $0.323954 1.69562^n$, in contrast to the number $2^{n-2}$ of (arbitrary) stem-loop structures as classically computed by Stein and Waterman. Finally, we show that the density of states for [all resp. canonical resp. saturated] secondary structures is asymptotically Gaussian. We introduce a stochastic greedy method to sample random saturated structures, called quasi-random saturated structures, and show that the expected number of base pairs of is $0.340633 n$.Comment: accepted: Journal of Bioinformatics and Computational Biology (2009) 22 page

Combinatorial analysis of interacting RNA molecules

Recently several minimum free energy (MFE) folding algorithms for predicting the joint structure of two interacting RNA molecules have been proposed. Their folding targets are interaction structures, that can be represented as diagrams with two backbones drawn horizontally on top of each other such that (1) intramolecular and intermolecular bonds are noncrossing and (2) there is no "zig-zag" configuration. This paper studies joint structures with arc-length at least four in which both, interior and exterior stack-lengths are at least two (no isolated arcs). The key idea in this paper is to consider a new type of shape, based on which joint structures can be derived via symbolic enumeration. Our results imply simple asymptotic formulas for the number of joint structures with surprisingly small exponential growth rates. They are of interest in the context of designing prediction algorithms for RNA-RNA interactions.Comment: 22 pages, 15 figure