Natural Products as Tools in Drug Discovery and Development

Dear Colleagues,

Natural products feature great structural and chemical diversity and constitute a wide library of small molecules, which are often templates for novel discoveries in medicinal chemistry and pharmacology. As witnessed by the recent literature production in this field, natural compounds still represent the best sources of drugs and drug leads. In the last two decades, nature has been re-discovered as the new horizon to face the novel challenges for the therapy of acute and chronic disease affecting humans, like cancer and microbial syndromes, for which the use of drugs has failed due to resistance increasing over time.
The aim of this Special Issue is to collect full papers, short communications, and review articles from research groups all over the world to show the most recent findings about the isolation, structural characterization, synthesis, and biological activity of natural products of microbial, fungal, and plant origin from known and novel sources and in the use of such compounds as tools for the design and development of new generations of drugs.
This Special Issue will be of great interest for several categories of scientists operating in natural product chemistry, medicinal chemistry phytochemistry, pharmacology, molecular biology, pharmacognosy, and others.

Prof. Dr. Francesco Epifano
Dr. Serena Fiorito
Guest Editors

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