In drug discovery and preclinical development there is a strong demand for the accurate and rapid characterization of processes such as absorption, distribution, metabolism and excretion.
The petroleum reservoir characterization process requires such very high degree of prediction accuracy that any deviation from expectation may result in huge losses and wasted efforts through enormous man-hours and huge investments.
It has been applied to the investigation of many different biological processes such diverse as the characterization of signaling pathways and the determination of protein interactions.
However, for remediation processes such as soil vapour extraction, characterization of airflow dispersion is necessary for improved modelling and prediction capabilities.
With the exception of still unclear mechanistic links to non-SCC mediated processes, such as transcription, the biggest splash since the characterization of cohesin in the 1990s was made with the discovery of the meiotic function of cohesin.
Characterization of lysine methylation has proven challenging despite its importance in biological processes such as gene transcription, protein turnover, and cytoskeletal organization.
The functional characterization of these genes shows that they are involved in critical cellular processes such as regulation of proliferation, differentiation and cell adhesion.
Although the origin and evolution of lineage-specific genes remains unresolved, the identification and characterization of putative lineage-specific genes can provide insight into species-specific functions and evolutionary processes such as speciation (divergence) and adaptation [ 4].
Other processes such as random walks may also be useful to develop new approaches and applications including network characterization, comparison, classification, modeling and model evaluation.
Hybrid speciation appears to be rare in animals, yet characterization of possible examples offers to shed light on the genomic consequences of this unique phenomenon, as well as more general processes such as the role of adaptation in speciation.
