Ear decomposition of 3-regular polyhedral links with applications.

In this paper, we introduce a notion of ear decomposition of 3-regular polyhedral links based on the ear decomposition of the 3-regular polyhedral graphs. As a result, we obtain an upper bound for the braid index of 3-regular polyhedral links. Our results may be used to characterize and analyze the structure and complexity of protein polyhedra and entanglement in biopolymers.