Metabolomics sciences are continuously growing andprospering as was clearly evident from the MetabolomicsSociety’s recent 7th annual conference, Metabolomics2011, held in Cairns, Australia from June 27th–30th. Atthe 2010 meeting in Amsterdam, Prof. Masaru Tomita(Keio University) proudly announced the location of the2011 meeting to be Tsuruoka, Japan. However, the sad anddevastating events earlier this year in Japan made itunwise to continue with all the hard work he and his teamhad diligently put in. The earthquake and Tsunami hitjust 10 days after the conference registration went online.Amazingly, the Society’s very loyal contingent in Australiavolunteered to take on the task of relocating the entiremeeting to Cairns, Australia and in just a few short months,organising an international conference from scratch. UteRoessner (University of Melbourne/Metabolomics Austra-lia), Simone Rochfort (Department of Primary Industries,Melbourne) and Rob Trengove (Murdoch University)deserve huge praise for all their efforts. With the willingsupport of Prof Tomita and his team they pulled off anamazing feat and organised an excellent meeting in Cairns,Northern Queensland attended by nearly 300 scientists andtrade representatives. An exciting program with almost 60oral presentations and 147 poster presentations wasassembled which included four workshops on topics likeimaging, NMR, GC-MS and LC-MS and biostatistics anddata analysis.Perhaps the greatest, long-lasting impression from allthe oral and poster presentations at Metabolomics 2011 isthe increasingly translational nature of the research beingreported. While just a few years ago a major component ofthese conferences related to the development and optimi-sation of wet and dry technologies for the delivery, man-agement and mining of metabolomics data, at Metabolomics2011 it was evident that a great and growing variety ofmetabolomics applications are already actively being pur-sued. Furthermore, from many of these diverse fields ofapplicationwearecontinuallyhearingoftheidentificationoffunctional biomarkers, development ofmetabolomics-basedtools for physiological studies, disease monitoring, diag-nostics, etc. Three of this year’s plenary speakers providedimpressive examples of translational metabolomics. In par-ticular, Prof. Tomita (Keio University, Tsuruoka, Japan)showed how Keio’s CE-MS ‘‘metabolomics factory’’ isbeing used to identify novel biomarkers for multiple liverdiseases, major depression and colon cancer. Prof. Holmes(Imperial College, London, UK) demonstrated how NMRand MS are being combined to help identify the human‘‘exposome’’ (the xenobiotic exposure/microbial metabolo-me) and to create an ‘‘Intelligent scalpel’’ for the emergingfield of surgical metabolomics. Finally, Dr. Meikle (BakerIDI Heart and Diabetes Institute, Melbourne, Australia)showed how quantitative lipidomics is leading to novelbiomarker profiles for cardiovascular disease and type IIdiabetes.However, it would be incorrect to say that the technol-ogy is now mature. The need for better tools for metaboliteidentification, metabolite quantification, robust procedures