A Special Issue for The International Biological Mass Spectrometry (BMS) Symposium 2016 in Tokyo.

is symposium, which was held on 14 and 15 October 2016 in the Nihonbashi Life Science Building in Tokyo, was organized by the biological mass spectrometry (BMS) division of the Mass Spectrometry Society of Japan. e subtitle of this symposium was “Advanced research in direct detection of metabolites and proteins in biological tissues and cells with ambient MS, imaging MS, and single-cell MS.” Recent developments and improvements of MS techniques have helped clarify the relationship between metabolites and proteins and allowed interesting biological phenomena to be observed directly. Imaging MS and single-cell MS can show us when and where the target metabolites are in biological tissues, the organs, and the body. Omics studies can reveal the function of untargeted molecules that we have not focused on. Ambient MS can develop new applications of the direct detection of metabolites, even for living targets. We invited the leading professors and researchers in these elds as keynote lectures.