I'm trying to get my head around what a pseudoknot is and how I can identify them given some RNA string. For example, suppose I have a string s = CGUUGUGUACACGAUAGUACAU. Suppose the two longest substring inversions are identified in bold CGUUGUGUACACGAUAGUACAU, which form the stack of the hairpin and everything after the first substring and before the start of the last substring make up the hairpin as illustrated below.
U G U
G A
U C
C - A
G - C
U - G A U A G U A C A U
By definition, a pseudoknot is defined as a secondary structure formed by pairing between a loop and a region located outside of the stem flanking the loop. In this example, we would start the pairing using some substring of the outer tail and start matching bases around the hairpin. My question: is the pseduoknot the alignment of these base pairs, and what is the significance of this alignment?