Volume 50, No. 5, 2005 Foreword to the Special Issue on Surface-Enhanced Raman Scat- tering (SERS) SERS is a thirty years old physical phenomenon that has become one of the most exciting analytical techniques with a wide range of applications in physics, chemistry and biology, and the corresponding applied sciences. This ultra- sensitive analytical tool covers the complete scale of sensitive analysis and diagnostics down to the limit of single molecule detection (SMD). There are now thousands of SERS publications in a wide range of scientific journals (for instance, SERS papers can be found in all the journals published by the ACS). The applications are relevant to trace analysis, environmental monitoring, nanobioscience among many others. The field is intrinsically connected with the optical properties of nanostructures and SERS techniques are also used for nanostructure characterization, since it can be discussed in terms of surface plasmon resonance of nanoparticles, nanoshells or voids, leading to nanophotonics, plasmonics and single-molecule detection. Therefore, nowadays, no attempt or claim can be made to review the field exhaustively in its entirety nor to cover all applications. This Third issue of Volume 52 of the Canadian Journal of Analytical Sciences and Spectroscopy (CJASS) brings to you contributions from the International Symposium on Surface-Enhanced Raman Scattering (SERS-2006) held at the Uegahara campus of Kwansei Gakuin University, Nishinomiya, Japan on 28-29 August 2006. This symposium was one of the satellite meetings of The 20th International Conference on Raman Spectroscopy (ICORS-2006) held at Yokohama, Japan on 20-25 August, 2006. The organizers of the symposium SERS-2006 that agreed to be the guest editors of this special issue are: Yukihiro Ozaki Department of Chemistry, School of Science & Tech- nology, and Research Center for Environment Friendly Polymers, Kwansei-Gakuin University 2-1 Gakuen, Sanda 669-1337, Japan ozaki@kwansei.ac.jp Zhong-Qun Tian State Key Laboratory for Physical Chemistry of Solid Surfaces, Department of Chemistry, Xiamen University 361005, China zqtian@xmu.edu.cn About 130 participants from 13 nations-Australia, Brazil, Canada, Czech, China, Germany, India, Japan, Korea, New Zealand, Spain, UK and USA- attended SERS-2006 to actively participate in the discussion of the latest find- ings and report the most recent progress in theory and applications of SERS. It was very encouraging to see the participation of many young researchers in the symposium presenting their new ideas. Their innovative approach and the development of new techniques impressed us all throughout the symposium. Invited lectures of SERS-2006 were as follows. Richard Van Duyne (Northwestern University, USA) presented a keynote lecture. R. Aroca (University of Windsor, Canada) Y. Fang (Capital Normal University, China) J. V. Garcia-Ramos (Instituto de Estructura de la Materia, Spain) R. Gomez (University of Alicante, Spain) R. Gu (Suzhou University, China) K. Imura (Institute for Molecular Science, Japan) T. Itoh (Advanced Industrial Science and Technology, Japan) K. Kim (Seoul National University, Korea) X. Y. Li (The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, China) M. Moskovits (University of California, Santa Barbara, USA) K. Murakoshi (Hokkaido University, Japan) M. J. Natan (Oxonica Inc., USA) A. Otto (Heinrich-Heine University, Germany)