Natural Products for Drug Discovery in the 21st Century: Innovations for Novel Therapeutics

Dear Colleagues,

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 bioactives 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. Thomas J. Schmidt
Prof. Dr. Ericsson Coy-Barrera
Prof. Dr. Ifedayo Victor Ogungbe
Guest Editor