In this paper we show that if the Stanley-Reisner ring of
the simplicial complex of independent sets of a bipartite graph

satisfies Serre's condition

, then

is Cohen-Macaulay. As a
consequence, the characterization of Cohen-Macaulay bipartite graphs
due to Herzog and Hibi carries over this family of bipartite graphs.
We check that the equivalence of Cohen-Macaulay property and the
condition

is also true for chordal graphs and we classify
cyclic graphs with respect to the condition

.