RNA Secondary Structure

The research of RNA structure and function is a very important question in bionformatics today. At the same time it has received a lot of development and deep going. It can sereve as a breakthrough to the reaseach of protein structure, function and genetic.A RNA sequence can be identified with a word over the alphabet N = {A, C, G, U} , while the secondary structure of RNA is a set of free bases and pairs which forms bonds between A-U and C-G. In some considerable extent, the secondary structure of RNA can be reduced into linear sequences. So the tools and methods in Combinatorics and Statistics will play important roles in studing linear sequences of biomolocular units . Also, we can present the geometric representation of biological sequences and structures. So the genometric topology and group theory are important also.At present it is very difficult to predict all the RNA secondary structures. This paper describes RNA secondary structure prediction methods from 1970' to this day in a systematic way some. Tracing back and following the tracks of prediction methods the author made a summary of RNA research progress and situation while a enumeration problem of RNA secondary structure is studied with the method of combinatorial enumeration.The main contents of this paper are listed as follows:In Chapter 2,we introduce some basic knowledge of molecular biology. Most of the terms and concepts used in this paper are explained briefly here.In Chapter 3, some information of the RNA secondary structure is introducedu in detail,such as development of method,cardinal principle, limitations and so on. Then we introduce some typical prediction algorithms of the RNA secondary structures.In Chapter 4, a enumeration problem of RNA secondary structure is studied with the method of combinatorial enumeration.