Natural Active Compounds in Foods: Screen, Sources and Health Benefits

Dear Colleagues,

With the popularity of healthy lifestyles, individials’ attention to the nutritional functions of food has increased. Many bioactive compounds in natural products derived from food (including plants, animals, etc.) have important effects on the human body, promoting health and preventing disease. The functional active ingredients of food include various categories of compounds, such as polyphenols, flavone, alkaloids, saponins, sterols, volatile oils, polysaccharides, and so on. These ingredients have various effects antioxidant, anti-inflammatory, anti-aging, lipid-lowering, hypoglycemic, sedative hypnotic and anti-tumor effects, which aid in the management and prevention of some diseases and are widely employed in healthcare products.

Studying the effective active ingredients in food can help clarify its nutritional value, with these functional compounds also being widely used in the development of nutraceuticals, drugs and beauty and skincare products. Therefore, effectively utilizing food active ingredients has become an important aspect of research in the food industry. By utilizing modern biotechnology and molecular biology methods to screen bioactive compounds, the efficacy, signaling pathways, and targets of these components can be clarified at the cellular and animal levels, providing a powerful tool for in-depth research concerning food active ingredients.

Therefore, this Special Issue of Foods, entitled “Natural Active Compounds in Foods: Screen, Sources and Health Benefits" welcomes the submission of articles whose scope includes, but is not limited to, the following topics:

• New methods for preparing active natural products and their biological significance.
• The efficient discovery and diversity mining of the active compounds in food.
• The biological synthesis and metabolic engineering of food active natural products.
• The development and utilization of specialty foods, new food resources, and their active ingredients.
• The screening and identification of Caenorhabditis elegans and food active ingredients.
• The identification of natural food active product targets and signaling pathways at the cellular and animal levels.

Prof. Dr. Jianguo Jiang
Dr. Liang Zhu
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Foods is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2900 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• food active compounds 
• activity screening 
• compound preparation 
• biological synthesis 
• metabolic engineering 
• new food resources 
• Caenorhabditis elegans 
• screening 
• targets 
• signal pathway