Vince and Bóna (2012) define an assembly tree for a connected simple graph
on
nodes as a binary rooted
tree with
leavesTree Leaf and
internal nodes and satisfying a number of additional properties. An assembly tree
for
describes a process motivated by considering the self-assembly
of macromolecules performed by virus capsids in the host cell (Kainen 2023).
The assembly number
of a graph
gives the number of assembly trees from which
can be built. These numbers therefore count ways to build
up a graph from subgraphs induced by various subsets of the vertices (Kainen 2023).
The assembly numbers for a number of parametrized graph are summarized in the table below (cf. Vince and Bóna 2012), where is a Catalan number and
is a double
factorial.