Foreword

This special issue of Mass Spectrometry contains the proceedings of the distinguished presentations from the last 62nd MSSJ annual conference, which was held during 14 May to 16 May, 2014, at Suita, Osaka. The papers were selected from the keynote lectures and best-presentation awardees by the program committee of the conference, and have been peer-reviewed by the editorial board of Mass Spectrometry.

There were 3 plenary and 12 keynote lectures, 54 oral and 110 poster presentations and award lectures presented at the conference. The conference hosted a total of 547 attendees, which was comparable to the attendance at recent annual MSSJ conferences in spite of the fact that only two-thirds of a year has passed since the 2013 conference.

The scope of the MSSJ conference was wide, reflecting the wide variety of applications of mass spectrometry within a wide range of science and engineering. However, the fundamentals, especially, instrumentation and ionization, have clearly been the key for the increased applications of mass spectrometry in all fields of science. Because of this, related topics accounted for a significant part of the program.

On behalf of the organizing committee, I wish to thank the members of the program committee for their efforts in creating a significant and well-organized scientific program, which resulted in the number and quality of the papers contained in this proceedings issue.