The Number of Circles of a Maximum State of a Plane Graph with Applications

Motivated by the connection with the genus of the corresponding link and its application on DNA polyhedral links, in this paper, we introduce a parameter smax(G), which is the maximum number of circles of states of the link diagram D(G) corresponding to a plane (positive) graph G. We show that smax(G) does not depend on the embedding of G and if G is a 4-edge-connected plane graph then smax(G) is equal to the number of faces of G, which cover the results of S. Y. Liu and H. P. Zhang as special cases.