Dear Colleagues,

You are cordially invited to contribute to the third edition of a Special Issue, namely, "Natural Products: From Isolation and Identification to Biological Activity—Third Edition".

It is widely accepted in the scientific community that natural products represent a major source of new chemical entities with potential applications for drug discovery (especially as anticancer and anti-infective agents). The discovery of new bioactive natural products as leads for therapeutic development can be inspired by ethnobotanical knowledge or achieved by screening a collection of extracts for bioactivity using in vitro, in cellulo, and even in vivo assays.

Traditionally, plants have been excellent sources of naturally produced compounds with biological effects; other organisms such as marine and terrestrial animals and microorganisms provide very important drug candidate molecules.

The biological activity and structural diversity of bioactive compounds are unsurpassed by any available synthetic screening libraries. As such, these privileged scaffolds serve as important biologically prevalidated platforms for the design of compound libraries in the search for new drug candidates with diverse indications for human health.

This Special Issue aims at gathering updates and recent advances on natural products as sources of bioactive compounds. This Special Issue may include full articles and reviews focused on new extraction procedures; the isolation and characterization of biologically active compounds from a wide range of natural sources; and in vitro and in vivo studies of the biological properties of extracts, fractions, and isolated compounds which could potentially be explored for the development of pharmaceuticals, cosmeceuticals, and nutraceuticals.

Dr. Natalizia Miceli
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 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

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.

• ethnobotany
• biological activity
• antioxidants
• phytochemical characterization
• plant secondary metabolites