Dr. Rick Dunn, Director of Mass Spectrometry at Phenome Centre Birmingham talks about the effects on metabolism from environmental changes and how that can be used to study human health and disease states with a view to developing stratified medicine. He describes the different experiments being undertaken to identify and quantify metabolites in both discovery and targeted mode and how Orbitrap mass spectrometers can power the structural characterisation of metabolites. He gives examples of two studies where developing a better understanding of biomarkers using mass spectrometry can lead to the development of improvements in health.