Abstract
A pseudoknot is a crucial intra-molecular structure formed primarily in RNA strands and closely related to important biological processes. This motivates us to define an operation that generates all pseudoknots from a given sequence and consider algorithmic and language theoretic properties of the operation. We design an efficient algorithm that decides whether or not a given string is a pseudoknot of a regular language L. Our algorithm runs in linear time if L is given by a deterministic finite automaton. We study closure and decision properties of the pseudoknot-generating operation. For DNA encoding applications, pseudoknot structures are undesirable. We give polynomial-time algorithms that check whether or not a regular language L contains a pseudoknot or a pseudoknot generated by some string of L. Furthermore, we show that the corresponding questions for context-free languages are undecidable.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 52-64 |
| Number of pages | 13 |
| Journal | Theoretical Computer Science |
| Volume | 696 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 2017 Oct 5 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:Cho and Han were supported by the Basic Science Research Program through NRF funded by MEST (2015R1D1A1A01060097), the Yonsei University Future-leading Research Initiative of 2016 and the IITP grant funded by the Korea government (MSIP) (R0124-16-0002), and Ng and Salomaa were supported by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada Grant OGP0147224.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2017 Elsevier B.V.
All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes
- Theoretical Computer Science
- Computer Science(all)