Journal Project Discription Final Report Back to Main Page



Project Discription



There has been much study focused around RNA word designs, where a RNA word is defined as a short strand over the RNA alphabet A, U, C, and G. These RNA words are designed with specific properties in mind to reduce and negate the natural tendencies of this biological matter. One property that word designers must fight is the tendency of RNA to fold onto itself and form a secondary structure. In this paper, we study the secondary structure which occurs when RNA words are concatenated into strands with the ability to store larger quantities of information. Our goal was to find an efficient algorithm which will take in 2n pre-designed words, where a word is defined as a sequence of RNA nucleotides, and it will return a ``yes'' or a ``no'' as to whether any of these 2^n combinations will fold into a secondary structure. This algorithm will allow us to confirm or deny suspicions about word design properties through careful testing. While attempting to test for specific properties of these words, we discovered testing bounds of secondary structures through formal language theory.


Journal Project Discription Final Report Back to Main Page