This issue is devoted to short communications based on oral and poster presentations at the free sessions of the Annual Meeting of the Society for the Study of Inborn Errors of Metabolism, held in Lyon, France, 6-9 September 1983. Due to the record number of free presentations at this meeting, we have been able to publish only a selection of the short communications offered. The free communications not reported elsewhere in this issue are listed below. Many of the short communications were submitted for the Noel Raine Award which commemorates the founding editor of the Journal of Inherited Metabolic Disease. Because of the quality and quantity of entrants two prizes were awarded, one to W. J. Rhead and B. A. Amendt for their paper’ Electron-transferring flavoprotein deficiency in the multiple acyl-CoA dehydrogenation disorders, glutaric aciduria type II and ethylmalonic-adipic aciduria’, the other to S. L. C. Woo, J. H. Robson and F. Guttler for their paper’ The possibility for prenatal diagnosis of PKU by linkage analyses based on phenylalanine hydroxylase locus specific DNA-polymorphisms’.