Combatting Infections: The Role of Antibacterial Natural Products and Nanoparticles
A special issue of Pharmaceutics (ISSN 1999-4923). This special issue belongs to the section "Drug Targeting and Design".
Deadline for manuscript submissions: 31 March 2026 | Viewed by 41
Special Issue Editors
Interests: antimicrobial; multidrug-resistant bacteria; antibacterial compounds; antimicrobial nanoparticles; pharmaceutical microbiology; bacterial and fungal biofilm
Interests: antiviral peptides; viral glycoproteins; dendrimer; natural extracts
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Special Issue Information
Dear Colleagues,
Fighting infections is one of the greatest challenges in modern medicine, and growing antibiotic resistance makes the search for new, effective solutions more urgent than ever. Natural products with antibacterial properties and nanotechnology play an increasingly important role in this fight. Plants, fungi, and other organisms have long been sources of bioactive compounds, such as flavonoids, alkaloids, and essential oils, which exhibit potent antibacterial activity. Their mechanisms of action often differ from those of synthetic antibiotics, allowing them to overcome existing resistance mechanisms.
Furthermore, recent years have seen rapid development in nanotechnology in microbiology. Nanoparticles, especially those based on metals such as silver, zinc, copper or titanium dioxide, offer a novel approach to combating pathogens. Thanks to their small size and large surface area, nanoparticles can effectively damage bacterial cell membranes, inhibit their metabolism, and disrupt DNA replication. They often act synergistically with standard antibiotics, reducing their minimum inhibitory concentrations (MICs) and thus enhancing their efficacy. Combining natural products with nanoparticles opens up new possibilities for designing therapies that can not only combat infections but also limit the development of resistance.
In this Special Issue, readers will find an overview of current progress in this field, with examples of achievements in the fight against multidrug-resistant bacteria using natural products with antibacterial properties and nanotechnology.
Dr. Iwona Skiba-Kurek
Dr. Carla Zannella
Guest Editors
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Keywords
- multidrug-resistant bacteria
- antibacterial compounds
- antimicrobial nanoparticles
- silver, zinc and copper nanoparticles
- skin and wound infections
- antibacterial mushroom extracts
- dressings
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