With the rapid emergence of RNA structure databases recently, efficient methods for RNA structure comparison are in demand for function prediction and evolutionary analysis. In this paper, we transform the complex secondary structure into the linear characteristic sequence which contains the information on primary sequence and the base pairing, and introduce the linear characteristic sequences into similarity analysis and phylogenetic analysis by using conditional LZ complexity. The results obtained from the two sets of real data have shown that our proposed method is effectual and feasible.

Key words: RNA secondary structures; Conditional LZ complexity; Linear characteristic sequences; Distance metric; Phylogenetic tree.