Natural Products in Plants: Synthesis, Analysis and Bioactivity

A special issue of Plants (ISSN 2223-7747). This special issue belongs to the section "Phytochemistry".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: 31 August 2025 | Viewed by 826

Special Issue Editors


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Guest Editor
Department of Pharmaceutical Sciences, University of Piemonte Orientale, Largo Guido Donegani 2/3, 28100 Novara, Italy
Interests: natural product chemistry; synthetic methodologies applied to natural product synthesis; medicinal chemistry of natural products
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
Department of Pharmaceutical Sciences, University of Eastern Piedmont, Largo Donegani 2, 28100 Novara, Italy
Interests: phytochemistry; isolation and structural elucidation of secondary metabolites; bioprospecting
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

Plants and their secondary metabolites represent invaluable sources of medicaments and drugs. While in the last century, the exploration of the universe of natural products saw miraculous breakthroughs, today the identification of secondary metabolites with new and unique structures is becoming more and more difficult. The fact that new chemical scaffolds are linked to new bioactivities could represent a limiting factor in the research for new drugs. This issue would be an opportunity to show the latest approaches in the discovery, analysis, and synthesis of new natural products with interesting biological profiles.

Dr. Alberto Minassi
Dr. Federica Pollastro
Guest Editors

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. Plants 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

  • secondary metabolites
  • natural products
  • synthesis of natural products
  • analysis
  • bioactivity

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Published Papers (1 paper)

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Research

13 pages, 1345 KiB  
Article
Genotypic Effect on Olive (Olea europaea) Fruit Phenolic Profile
by Hande Yılmaz-Düzyaman, Lorenzo León, Raúl de la Rosa, Araceli Sánchez-Ortiz, Alicia Serrano, Francisco Luque, Carlos Sanz and Ana G. Perez
Plants 2025, 14(13), 1981; https://doi.org/10.3390/plants14131981 - 28 Jun 2025
Viewed by 177
Abstract
Phenolic compounds are important targets in olive breeding due to their health benefits and impact on fruit and oil quality. Fruit phenolic profiling enables efficient screening of large germplasm collections without oil extraction, but environmental variability, especially year-to-year differences, affects their expression. The [...] Read more.
Phenolic compounds are important targets in olive breeding due to their health benefits and impact on fruit and oil quality. Fruit phenolic profiling enables efficient screening of large germplasm collections without oil extraction, but environmental variability, especially year-to-year differences, affects their expression. The aim of this study was to assess the genotypic influence on fruit phenolic composition, based on a three-year evaluation of 10 wild olive genotypes and 75 cultivars from an olive core collection. Each genotype was sampled in at least two seasons, with 1 to 3 trees analyzed annually. Variance analysis revealed significant genetic variation among cultivars and notable genotype-by-year interactions for certain phenolics. Broad-sense heritability was generally high for most compounds, although some, such as ligstroside and ligstroside aglycone, showed greater environmental sensitivity. Best linear unbiased predictions (BLUPs) were highly correlated with average relative phenotypic values. Clustering analyses identified strong associations among key phenolic compounds and highlighted distinct metabolic profiles separating wild and cultivated genotypes, reflecting differences in phenolic accumulation patterns. These findings demonstrate the genetic and environmental influences on olive fruit phenolics and provide reliable estimates to support future marker-assisted selection studies aimed at developing useful tools in olive breeding programs. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Natural Products in Plants: Synthesis, Analysis and Bioactivity)
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