The purpose of the research is to determine which graphical invariants are indicative of secondary RNA structures when the structure is represented as a tree. We will use the trees provided by the RNA Database, located at the website http://monod.nyu.edu/. This data bank is provided by the Tamar Schlick group of the division of Computational Biology/Chemistry/Biomathematics. In order to study the trees under consideration, we will construct the corresponding line graphs and secondary line graphs. Using these line graphs, we will determine invariants such as diameter, radius, and possibly the chromatic number for the line graphs of trees of order six and seven. We will analyze the results of our calculations to see if there is a correlation between the numbers and the trees that are known to represent the secondary RNA structure. We will then test our hypothesis by using these invariants to predict which trees of order eight are representative of secondary RNA structure.
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