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A Predictive Model Which Uses Descriptors Of Rna Secondary Structures Derived From Graph Theory., Alissa Ann Rockney

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The secondary structures of ribonucleic acid (RNA) have been successfully modeled with graph-theoretic structures. Often, simple graphs are used to represent secondary RNA structures; however, in this research, a multigraph representation of RNA is used, in which vertices represent stems and edges represent the internal motifs. Any type of RNA secondary structure may be represented by a graph in this manner. We define novel graphical invariants to quantify the multigraphs and obtain characteristic descriptors of the secondary structures. These descriptors are used to train an artificial neural network (ANN) to recognize the characteristics of secondary RNA structure. Using the ANN, …