Metabolomics has expanded hugely in the last 10 years, as a result of the growing realisation of its value in driving advances in food and nutrition, agriculture, and especially healthcare. But with this has come the need to improve the ability of untargeted analytical methods to tackle the highly complex mixtures common in metabolomics. Prof. Zheng-Zhu Principal and Lucy Woods at Bruker Daltonics examine this challenge and look at the potential offered by the emerging technique of ion mobility spectrometry with mass spectrometry (IMS–MS).