In this research, we aim to
provide a tree similarity algorithm for RNA (ribonucleic acid) secondary
structure comparison. The elements (nucleotides and nucleotide-pairs) of an RNA
secondary structure are represented as normalized node-weighted trees. We show
that our weighted tree representations of RNA secondary structures are more
informative and useful. Based on this unique representation for RNA secondary
structure, we propose a weighted-tree similarity algorithm for computing the
similarity between RNA secondary structures. The algorithm is justified by
computing similarities among several well-known RNA secondary structures. For a
given RNA secondary structure, the proposed algorithm provides a ranked list of
RNA structures in a database according to their similarity values with the
query RNA. Hence, our algorithm can be helpful in predicting the functions and
the class of a newly discovered RNA.