Foreword

This special issue of Mass Spectrometry is the proceedings of the 19th IMSC which was hosted by the Mass Spectrometry Society of Japan (MSSJ) during the period 15 September to 21 September, 2012, at Kyoto.

IMSC was started in 1958 and meetings have been held triennially in twelve European countries to date. During the 4th IMSC at Berlin in 1967, a proposal that IMSC be hosted by MSSJ was discussed by the steering committee, but ultimately was not realized. Since then, MSSJ has hosted international meetings in 1969 and 1992 both in the Kyoto International Conference Center. After twenty years, MSSJ was able to hold IMSC at the same venue with these two meetings.

In this conference, we had 8 plenary and 43 keynote lectures, 182 oral and 782 poster presentations and award lectures by three Thomson Medal awardees and one Curt Brunnée Award winner. Workshops on six topics were held in the evenings. A Summer School for students and young scientists (September 13, 14) and three short courses (September 15, 16) preceded the conference as official events. In addition, the 3rd Asia–Oceania MS Conference for participants from Asia and the Oceania regions was held in the evenings. There were a total of 1,819 participants making the scale of the conference was comparable to those for recent IMSCs that were held in Prague and Bremen, in spite of the march 2011 earthquake/tsunami and the resulting nuclear disaster.

The scope of the 19th IMSC was wide, reflecting the spread of applications of mass spectrometry to a wide range of fields. However, the fundamentals, such as instrumentation, ionization and ion chemistry continue to hold the key for mass spectrometry to advance and meet application demands, and thus occupied a significant part of the program. The local organizing committee wishes to thank the program committee members for their efforts in building a well-balanced scientific program, which is represented by the papers contained in this proceedings issue.