Isolation of Microorganisms for Specific Natural Products and Enzymes
A Special Issue of Marine Drugs (ISSN 1660-3397) belonging to the section "Marine Biotechnology Related to Drug Discovery or Production".
Deadline for manuscript submissions: 31 March 2027 | Viewed by 23
Editors
Interests: microbial ecology; metagenomics; microbial isolation and cultivation; deep-sea enzyme; oligosaccharides
Interests: virus diversity; virus-host interactions; phage therapy; viromics; deep-sea viral enzymes
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Special Issue Information
Dear Colleagues,
Microorganisms, including bacteria, fungi, and microalgae, are among the richest sources of structurally diverse natural products and enzymes with significant bioactive and biocatalytic properties. Thousands of unique metabolites and countless enzymatic activities have been identified, many with promising applications in biomedicine, industrial biotechnology, agriculture, and environmental remediation. However, the growing demand for novel bioactive compounds and efficient biocatalysts calls for exploring underexplored microbial niches, particularly marine environments, and unlocking the hidden biosynthetic and enzymatic potential of microorganisms.
Traditional discovery pipelines often rediscover known compounds and fail to activate silent biosynthetic gene clusters (BGCs) or cryptic enzyme-encoding genes. Recent advances in innovative cultivation, genome mining, heterologous expression, metabolomics, and multi‑omics integration now enable us to activate these cryptic pathways and access novel chemistry and enzymatic functions. These approaches not only expand the chemical diversity available for various applications but also provide new tools for biocatalysis and synthetic biology.
This Special Issue, “Isolation of Microorganisms for Specific Natural Products and Enzymes,” aims to present cutting-edge research on the isolation, cultivation, and characterization of microorganisms for the targeted production of bioactive natural products and enzymes—from strain discovery to compound identification and enzyme functional characterization.
Topics include, but are not limited to, the following:
- Discovery of novel microbes, phages, and enzymes
- Distribution and regulation of microbes and enzymes with bioactive or biocatalytic functions
- Genome mining and bioinformatics-guided discovery of BGCs and enzyme-coding genes
- Activation of silent BGCs via chemical elicitation, co‑culture, or heterologous expression
- Biosynthetic pathway elucidation for natural products and enzyme-mediated transformations
- Integrated metabolomics and genomics for accelerated discovery of novel metabolites and enzymes
- Marine natural products from deep‑sea, sponge‑associated, or mangrove‑derived microbes
- Structure elucidation and bioactivity evaluation of new metabolites
- Enzyme discovery, characterization, and engineering from marine microorganisms for industrial and biotechnological applications
- Synthetic biology and metabolic engineering for enhanced production of target compounds and enzymes
- Ecological insights into marine secondary metabolism and enzymatic functions
We welcome original research, reviews, and short communications that advance our understanding of how strategic microbial isolation can unlock the biosynthetic and enzymatic potential of microorganisms for applications in drug discovery, biocatalysis, and other biotechnological fields.
Dr. Wu Qu
Prof. Dr. Min Jin
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 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.
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-anonymized peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Marine Drugs is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly 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.
Keywords
- microbial isolation
- biosynthetic gene clusters
- natural product discovery
- metabolomics
- bioactive metabolites
- enzyme discovery and distribution
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