ABSTRACT
Metabolomics is a vibrant field, developing fast and attracting many scientists from adjacent disciplines. Its multi-disciplinarity bases are one of the defining features of metabolomics. The number of publications on metabolomics describing really interesting biology, the number of success stories, is steadily increasing. Localization of compounds has already become an active topic, and imaging approaches are basically constituting research fields in their own right. Finally, the awareness of the importance of knowing more about the metabolome in many different fields is increasing as well. Also the number of data sets made available through generally accessible repositories is increasing. The speed at which new developments are arriving has forced us to make choices—there are many exciting developments, especially on the instrumentation level, that have not been included in the book as several texts already exist on these topics.
