Dear Colleagues,

Sample treatment is, without any doubt, the backbone of chemical analysis. Always underestimated, many times neglected, sample treatment needs to be recalled from the limbo in which it has been thrown during the last decades. With this aim the Lisbon Christmas Conference on sample treatment has been created. The idea is to join all of us working with sample treatment in a 3 day conference, in a nice place (Lisbon) during one of the most beautiful periods of the year: December.

As for the obvious question you already have in mind, but what is sample treatment? the following answer is proposed: any tool that helps to interrogate any measurable matter. Thus, ultrasonic energy or microwave energy can be used to extract analytes from solid substances; the use of such energy can be considered sample treatment. However, to interrogate the analytes we need analytical devices, such as atomic absorption spectrometry, RMN or mass spectrometry. The correct application of such devices or the development of new ones is also sample treatment. But there is more to tell. Many times a large number of samples need to be interrogated. Data compiled after extracting analytes and after analyzing them is nothing if we do not use chemometrics to understand all the information we have retrieved. This is also sample treatment.

The organizing and scientific committee is proud to welcome you to the Second Caparica Christmas Conference on Sample Treatment.

Special Issue on Talanta

We are glad to inform you that we are preparing a special issue linked (but not limited) to the Sample Treatment 2016 conference in Talanta. The editors kindly have suggested a focus on sample treatment for proteomics, addressing new/recent concepts such as nanoparticles, tissue imaging, label free mass spectrometry-based protein quantification, protein arrays, and so on.

And last, but not least, we have some of the best in the arena:

	Dr. J.L. Gómez-Ariza Universidad de Huelva, Departamento de Química y Ciencia de los Materiales, Facultad de Ciencias Experimentales, Huelva (Spain)
		Dr. Juan J. Calvete Instituto de Biomedicina de Valencia, CSIC, Valencia (Spain)
			Dr.Rafael Cela Facultat de Química, Universidade de Santiago de Compostela (Spain)
				Dr. Jane Thomas Oates Department of Chemistry, University of York (UK)
				Dr. Marco Zezzi Arruda Universidade de Campinas, Campinas (Brazil)
				Dr. Simona Francese Sheffield Hallam University, Sheffield (UK=

The Keynotes can be viewed here
The Oral Contributions can be viewed here

Yours truly
J. L. Capelo

C. Lodeiro
Conference chairs
On behalf of the organizing and scientific committee

Subjects

• Analytical Chemistry
• Sample treatment for inorganic and elemental analysis
• Sample treatment for the analysis of organic molecules
• Sample treatment for physical-chemistry analysis
• Sample treatment for biomedical analysis
• Automatic methods (FIA-SIA)
• Chemometrics
• Informatics
• New tools for sample treatment and analysis