Shapes of interacting RNA complexes are studied using a filtration via their
topological genus. A shape of an RNA complex is obtained by (iteratively)
collapsing stacks and eliminating hairpin loops. This shape-projection
preserves the topological core of the RNA complex and for fixed topological
genus there are only finitely many such shapes.Our main result is a new
bijection that relates the shapes of RNA complexes with shapes of RNA
structures.This allows to compute the shape polynomial of RNA complexes via the
shape polynomial of RNA structures. We furthermore present a linear time
uniform sampling algorithm for shapes of RNA complexes of fixed topological
genus.Comment: 38 pages 24 figure
