Natural Products for Drug Discovery in the 21st Century: Innovations for Novel Therapeutics, 2nd Edition

Dear Colleagues,

Following the first successful Special Issue on this topic (available here), we are happy to announce a second edition titled “Natural Products for Drug Discovery in the 21st Century: Innovations for Novel Therapeutics, 2nd Edition”.

Natural products (NPs) from plants, fungi, and various microorganisms have played very important roles in modern drug discovery. They still do so in the 21st century. An increasing number of highly promising discoveries in this field are published in natural product periodicals such as Molecules every year. This Special Issue within the Natural Products Chemistry Section of Molecules will feature some of the recent and most promising findings in this area.

Original communications may be related to structurally new NPs with exciting potential as hits or lead structures, novel findings on the biological effects and therapeutic potential of previously known natural products, new results on structure–activity relationships and/or mechanisms of action within particularly promising classes of natural products, applications on statistical integration of chemical and biological activity datasets for pattern recognition to determine promising bioactive from mixtures of natural origin, and articles on the fast-growing field of development and application of new strategies and approaches for the discovery of new NPs with bioactivity and therapeutic potential. Last but not least, timely, critical, and comprehensive reviews on particularly interesting topics within the broad field of natural products chemistry and biology are highly welcome.

Please note that a strong focus in this Special Issue will be put on a clear connection between chemical structure and biological/therapeutic effects. Thus, communications on the biological effects of chemically uncharacterized or poorly characterized preparations of “alternative therapeutic systems” or crude extracts/fractions without a clear connection to the underlying chemical principles will not be considered.

Prof. Dr. Ericsson Coy-Barrera
Prof. Dr. Ifedayo Victor Ogungbe
Prof. Dr. Thomas J. Schmidt
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-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Molecules 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 2700 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.