Speaker

:

Dr. Siddhartha Gadgil 

Subject Area

:

Mathematics

Venue

:

Lecture Hall - I, Dept of Mathematics

Time

:

4.00 pm

Date  

:

February 6,2008 (Wednesday)

Title

:

Watson-Crick pairing for RNA and Milnor's link invariants

We study the secondary structure of RNA determined by Watson-Crick pairing without pseudo-knots using Milnor invariants of links. We focus on the first non-trivial invariant, which can be interpreted in terms of the Heisenberg group as well as lattice paths, which we call the Heisenberg invariant.

We show that the Heisenberg invariant is related to a dynamically, hence biologically, important property of RNA folding. Namely, if the Heisenberg invariant in large, then there are widely separated local maxima for the number of Watson-Crick pairs found.