This Symposium is the 13th in the series of international meetings organised by the International Isotope Society every 3 years. Since the beginning of the new millennium the scientists from many diverse fields related to the use of isotopes and isotopically labelled compounds have met in Dresden, Germany (2000), Boston, Massachusetts, USA (2003), Edinburgh, Great Britain (2006), Chicago, Illinois, USA (2009), Heidelberg, Germany (2012) and Princeton, New Jersey, USA (2015).