Floral/Bee-Collected Pollen: Chemical Characterization, Nutritional Properties, Functionality, Bioactivity, and Pharmaco-Medical Applications
A special issue of Molecules (ISSN 1420-3049). This special issue belongs to the section "Natural Products Chemistry".
Deadline for manuscript submissions: 30 September 2026 | Viewed by 4
Special Issue Editor
Interests: bee products; phytochemistry; bioactive compounds; food analytical chemistry; nutritional composition of food; health risk assessment
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Special Issue Information
Dear Colleagues,
In the era of consumer awareness regarding healthy diets, bee products stand out as important market products. Among them, bee-collected pollen has risen as a near-perfect food. It has improved stability compared to floral pollen due to bees’ enzymes activity. With its exceptional nutritional composition, pollen is also recognized as an outstanding source of different bioactive compounds. With an excellent balance of carbohydrates, proteins, and lipids, pollen can provide fantastic dietary intake of all important nutrients. Also, due to ambiguous properties (both lipophilic and hydrophilic), it is an excellent functional food ingredient with the possibility to enrich prepared products with both lipophilic and hydrophilic nutrients/phytochemicals. Apart from this, due to a great diversity of phenolic compounds (in particular flavonols and their glycosides), pollen has been proven to be an excellent source of pharmaceuticals, which can be applied in both in vitro and in vivo tests regarding different pharmaco-medicinal applications in order to prevent some inflammation processes, as well as other disorders caused by oxidative stress. What is characteristic of pollen is its abundance of phenylamides, an extremely important group of secondary metabolites, which has recently been recognized as an important carrier of pollen’s bioactivity and can be a new field for research regarding this product. In that sense, this Special Issue intends to collect all novel data about both floral and bee-collected pollen, its chemical composition (including both nutrients and bioactive compounds), and the most novel techniques applied to the determination and examination of its composition, functionality, and bioactivity, as well as possible applications in the fields of food, pharmacy, and medicine.
Dr. Aleksandar Ž. Kostić
Guest Editor
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.
Keywords
- pollen
- nutrients
- bioactive compounds
- analytical techniques
- phenolics
- carotenoids
- phenylamides
- application
Benefits of Publishing in a Special Issue
- Ease of navigation: Grouping papers by topic helps scholars navigate broad scope journals more efficiently.
- Greater discoverability: Special Issues support the reach and impact of scientific research. Articles in Special Issues are more discoverable and cited more frequently.
- Expansion of research network: Special Issues facilitate connections among authors, fostering scientific collaborations.
- External promotion: Articles in Special Issues are often promoted through the journal's social media, increasing their visibility.
- Reprint: MDPI Books provides the opportunity to republish successful Special Issues in book format, both online and in print.
Further information on MDPI's Special Issue policies can be found here.
