The second Modern Solid Phase Peptide Synthesis and its Applications symposium was held from the 8th to the 11th October, 2009 at the beautiful Sea World Resort on the Gold Coast, Queensland, Australia. The symposium, an official satellite meeting of the 8th Australian Peptide Conference, coincided with the 50th anniversary of Professor Bruce Merrifield’s 1959 publication which first described solid phase peptide synthesis (SPPS). Since then over 60,000 articles have been published where synthetic peptides are featured and today greater than 1,200 articles per year are published that use synthetic peptides within their research design. These figures strongly indicate the importance synthetic peptides have and continue to play in many areas of chemical and medical research. With increasing awareness of the benefits and uses of synthetic peptides there has been an ever greater demand placed on peptide chemists to produce synthetic peptides cheaply, in large quantities, sometimes by the tonne, as well as, peptides with defined structure and or peptides with phosphoryl, glycosyl, lipid or fluorescent moieties. These increasing demands have led chemists to develop new synthetic methods to meet these needs using SPPS. The 2nd Solid Phase Peptide Synthesis and its Applications symposium aimed to capture the latest developments in these areas by bringing together industrial and research chemists from all over the world to discuss, share knowledge, collaborate and develop new ideas.

Over 100 delegates from all areas of the world participated in an stimulating scientific program that was prepared by the conference chairman, John Wade, and the local and international scientific organizing committees. The opening plenary session given by Professors Jean Martinez and Gregg Fields on “The use of solid supports in the synthesis of biomolecules” and “synthesis of collagen-model triple-helical peptides and peptidomimetics”, respectively, was in honour of Professor Geoffrey Tregear who, although recently retired, attended the meeting. The opening plenaries set the scene for the symposium and the enthusiastic and lively discussions during and after each session continued for the whole symposium and made for new scientific insights and collaborations. The scientific program covered the major themes of SPPS with sessions which included “Novel SPPS methodology”, “Scale-up/Industrial SPPS”, “Biological and clinical applications”, “SPPS of difficult/complex peptides”, “Conformationally constrained peptides” and “SPPS—of glycol/lipopeptides”. Once again oral presentations were also complemented by an evening poster session. The organising committee would like to thank the financial support provided by and participation of major sponsors Australian Peptide Association, Auspep, Beckman-Coulter, CBL, CEM, DKSH and GlycoSyn as well as other sponsors and supporters as their support for this meeting has a direct and significant impact on its.

With the variety and broad range of novel SPPS stratagems, its application both in a research and industrial setting delegates were asked to submit an article on their work for this special issue of the International Journal of Peptide Research and Therapeutics. This special issue brings together a collection of fully peer-reviewed articles that demonstrates the expanse of the SPPS field and touches on the flavour of the meeting and the excitement brought by each of the delegates. We would like to thank each of the contributing authors for their patience and cooperation in making this special issue possible. We are also very grateful to all of the referees who agreed and then quickly reviewed these articles and to Kruthika Janani and Marie Veth C. Chua from the Editorial Office at Springer Publishing. Our thanks also to Robert Maged of Springer for his excellent copyediting of this special issue. A final thank you must go to the delegates who attended this meeting and made it so enjoyable. The success of this second meeting has led to a third meeting being planned for 2011, again as part of a satellite symposium in conjunction with the 9th Australian Peptide Conference for details please go to www.peptideoz.org.

We hope that the articles presented here, which are a reflection of the meeting and what researchers both academic and industrial are currently working on, afford to you new ways to approach your research and provide novel peptidic tools to enhance and to better understand the intricacies of our world.