We review a recent formulation of the RNA folding problem as an N\times N matrix field theory. It is based on a systematic classification of the terms in the partition function according to their topological character. In particular large-N terms yield the secondary structures, whereas pseudo-knots are obtained by calculating the 1/N2 corrections. We also describe a Monte Carlo algorithm for the prediction of RNA secondary structures with pseudoknots, based on this topological approach.
PACS numbers: 87.14.Gg, 82.39.Pj, 02.10.Yn
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