A new family of metrics for biopolymer contact structures.

ABSTRACT

Contact structures are simplified representations of biopolymers' three-dimensional structures. In this paper we introduce a new family of metrics (dm)m >/=3 for contact structures of a fixed length, based on their representation by means of edge ideals of a polynomial ring, that generalize Reidys and Stadler's subgroup metric for RNA secondary structures. We study some abstract properties of these metrics, and we obtain explicit descriptions of them for some values of m.