It is my great pleasure to be a participant in the 2nd AGS meeting in Adelaide as a key note speaker on behalf of the Japanese participants, I would like to acknowledge the organizing committee members, especially Morten Thaysen-Andersen and the Japanese organizer Koichi Fukase who successfully obtained funding to support this conference from JSPS. Without their effort this meeting would not be able to be held. Actually in 2004 under the umbrella of HUPO, I initiated HGPI (Human Disease Glycomics/Proteome Initiative) in collaboration with a number of other worldwide glycoscientists including Martin Frank (originally his mentor、the late Willi von den Lied), Yoshinao Wada, Kazuki Nakamura, Hisashi Narimatsu, James Paulson, Nicki Packer, Pauline Rudd, Catherine Costello and many others. We performed multi-laboratory pilot studies dealing with the glycoprotein analysis of N-glycans and O-glycans by using mainly MS and proposed some standard analytical methods for achieving this. Yoshinao, Nicki and Pauline contributed greatly to these HGPI pilot studies.
In recent years there were very few glycoscientists participating in HUPO meetings and there were nearly no sessions on glycans.We now have a chance to all attend and participate in HUPO on this occasion. It has been more than 14 years since we started HPGI and now Nicki and Morten have initiated a new initiative HGI (Human Glycoproteomics Initiative) under HUPO and I am sure that HGI will result in many advancements in our understanding of health and disease. In the past, glycoproteomics were a rather static type of research but we are in a position to move on to the more dynamic studies in terms of glycan structures and functions in relation to health and disease. It is now obvious that research and development on new dynamic glycoproteome codes have come of age again.