Dear Colleagues,

We are pleased to announce the winners of the Metabolites 2020 Outstanding Reviewer Award. The Metabolites Editorial Board and Editorial Team would like to gratefully acknowledge the time and energy dedicated by all of the reviewers in checking the manuscripts submitted to Metabolites. It is thanks to their efforts that the high quality of the journal and quick turnaround is maintained.

Dr. Nguyen Phuoc Long
Center for Personalized Precision Medicine of Tuberculosis and PharmacoGenomics Research Center, Inje University College of Medicine, Busan 614-735, Korea.
Research Interest: multi-omics; personalized medicine; translational research; pharmacology; environmental health.

Dr. Stanislaw Deja
Center for Human Nutrition, University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, Dallas, TX, 75390, USA.
Research Interest: stable isotope tracers; metabolic flux analysis (MFA); computational models of metabolism; obesity and diabetes; liver metabolism.

Dr. Xian Luo
Department of Chemistry, University of Alberta, Edmonton T6G 2G2, AB, Canada.
Research Interest: metabolomics; mass spectrometry; LC–MS; stable isotope labeling.

Kind regards,
Prof. Dr. Peter Meikle, Metabolites

Dear Colleagues,

We are pleased to announce that the winner of the Metabolites 2020 Young Investigator Award is Dr. Rodrigo Ledesma-Amaro.

Dr. Rodrigo Ledesma-Amaro is the Group leader at Imperial College London (Lecturer), Dept. Bioengineering and the Imperial College Centre for Synthetic Biology. He obtained his PhD at the University of Salamanca under the supervision of Prof. Jose Luis Revuelta. During his PhD, Rodrigo was a visiting researcher at Prof. Jens Nielsen’s group at Chalmers University of Technology (Sweden), at Prof. Jean-Marc Nicaud’s lab at INRA (France), and at Prof. Kamisaka’s group at AIST (Japan). After the PhD, he moved to France thanks to an Agreenskills Marie Curie Fellowship and he performed his postdoc in the group of Jean-Marc Nicaud. Most of his postdoctoral research work was done on the oleaginous yeast Yarrowia lipolytica. The research of Dr. Ledesma-Amaro has focused on the understanding and engineering of metabolism in industrial microorganisms and microbial communities with the aim of creating more sustainable bioproduction methods.

As the awardee, Dr. Ledesma-Amaro will receive an honorarium of 2000 CHF and a certificate of award.

We would like to thank all the nominators from various fields of study for their participation and all the Award Committee Members for their evaluation of the abundant excellent nominations.

Metabolites 2020 Young Investigator Award Evaluation Committee

On behalf of the Editor-in-Chief, Prof. Dr. Peter Meikle, we are pleased to announce the Metabolites 10th Anniversary Best Paper Award 2020.

Papers published in 2018 and 2019 were selected by the Metabolites Editorial Office. The winner nominations were made by a selection committee, which was chaired by the Editor-in-Chief and supported by ten Editorial Board Members. The two top-voted original research papers and one top-voted review paper have won the 2020 Metabolites 10th Anniversary Best Paper Award:

Mind the Gap: Mapping Mass Spectral Databases in Genome-Scale Metabolic Networks Reveals Poorly Covered Areas
Clément Frainay, Emma L. Schymanski, Steffen Neumann, Benjamin Merlet, Reza M. Salek, Fabien Jourdan and Oscar Yanes
Metabolites 2018, 8, 51; doi: 10.3390/metabo8030051
Available online: https://www.mdpi.com/2218-1989/8/3/51

Population-Level Analysis to Determine Parameters That Drive Variation in the Plasma Metabolite Profiles
Mahmoud Al-Majdoub, Katharina Herzog, Bledar Daka, Martin Magnusson, Lennart Råstam, Ulf Lindblad and Peter Spégel
Metabolites 2018, 8, 78; doi: 10.3390/metabo8040078
Available online: https://www.mdpi.com/2218-1989/8/4/78

Software Tools and Approaches for Compound Identification of LC-MS/MS Data in Metabolomics
Ivana Blaženović, Tobias Kind, Jian Ji and Oliver Fiehn
Metabolites 2018, 8, 31; doi: 10.3390/metabo8020031
Available online: https://www.mdpi.com/2218-1989/8/2/31

We congratulate and thank the authors for having chosen Metabolites to publish their work.

In recognition of their accomplishment, the authors will collectively receive a cash award of 500 CHF, and the privilege of publishing an additional research article or review paper free of charge in open access format in Metabolites after the usual peer-review procedure.

Dear Colleagues,

As Editor-in-Chief of Metabolites, I am pleased to announce the winners of the 2019 Metabolites Travel Award on behalf of the Evaluation Committee:

FREDD VERGARA, a Postdoctoral Researcher at the German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv) whose research is centered on the topic of chemical ecology with emphasis on analytical chemistry. He is planning to present his work “Water Availability in the Soil and its Effects on Tropane Alkaloid Metabolism in Datura stramonium” at the Metabolomics 2019 Conference (23–27 June 2019, The Hague, the Netherlands) and International Society of Chemical Ecology (2–6 June 2019, Atlanta, GA, USA).

JENNIFER MATTHEWS, a Postdoctoral Researcher at University of Technology, Sydney, whose research focuses on employing state-of-theart molecular, imaging, and microbiological techniques to identify the key metabolic networks in Symbiodiniacea–bacteria associations that drive dinoflagellate ecological success. She is planning to present her work “Microbial Metabolic Networks: The Hidden Key to Resilience of Coral Algal Endosymbionts” at the Metabolomics 2019 Conference (23–27 June 2019, The Hague, the Netherlands).

Each Travel Award consists of a certificate and 800 CHF to attend an academic conference of their choice in 2019. Congratulations to the winners of this highly competitive travel award.

We would like to thank all the Scientific Committee members for their assiduous evaluation of the candidates. It was a difficult decision given the high quality of the award applications, and we thank all applicants.

The 2020 Metabolites Travel Awards will be open for applications from the second half of 2019 to early next year. Please check www.mdpi.com/journal/ metabolites/awards for more information closer to that time.

Professor Peter J Meikle BSc (Hons), PhD.
Editor-in-Chief of Metabolites (ISSN 2218-1989)
Leader, Obesity and Diabetes Program
Head, Metabolomics Laboratory
NHMRC Senior Research Fellow Program Head, Metabolism
Baker IDI Heart and Diabetes Institute

Dear Colleagues,

As Editor-in-Chief of Metabolites, I am pleased to announce the winner of the 2018 Metabolites Travel Award on behalf of the Evaluation Committee:

XIAOTAO SHEN, PhD student at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, whose research focuses on the development of various bioinformatic approaches/tools for untargeted metabolomics. He is planning to present his work “Metabolic Reaction Network-based Recursive Metabolite Identification for Untargeted Metabolomics” at the Metabolomics 2018 Conference (24–28 June 2018, Seattle, USA). The award consists of 800 Swiss Francs towards attending this conference.

It was a difficult decision with such high quality applications for the award and we thank all applicants. We wish to congratulate Mr. Xiaotao Shen for his accomplishments.

Prof. Peter J Meikle
Editor-in-Chief

Dear Colleagues,

As Editor-in-Chief of Metabolites, I am pleased to announce the winner of the 2017 Metabolites Travel Award on behalf of the Evaluation Committee:

KATIE HILLYER，Postdoc fellow at the Victoria University of Wellington, whose research seeks to understand the role of metabolism and free metabolite pools in organism function during exposure to cellular stress. She is planning to present her work “Mapping carbon fate during coral bleaching: the application of ¹³C metabolomics”at the Metabolomics 2017 (June 25–29, Brisbane, Australia). The award consists of 800 Swiss Francs towards attending this conference.

It was a difficult decision with such high quality applications for the award and we thank all applicants. We wish to congratulate Dr. Katie Hillyer for her accomplishments.

A/Prof. Peter J Meikle,
Editor-in-Chief