Advances in Plant Natural Products Biosynthesis and Metabolic Engineering—2nd Edition
A special issue of Plants (ISSN 2223-7747). This special issue belongs to the section "Phytochemistry".
Deadline for manuscript submissions: 30 June 2026 | Viewed by 4289
Special Issue Editors
Interests: plant secondary metabolism; biosynthetic chemistry; multi-omics; enzyme element characterization
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Interests: plant secondary metabolism; biosynthetic regulation; evaluation and utilization of medicinal plant resources
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Special Issue Information
Dear Colleagues,
Plant natural products contribute to many biological and ecological functions. They are synthesized by plants to interact with the biotic and abiotic environments, playing roles in plant defense, growth, and development. Additionally, plant natural products have widespread applications in human industries, including food additives, cosmetics, dyes, insecticides, and drugs. The biosynthesis of these natural products is complex and dynamic, with more than one million natural products identified from terrestrial and aquatic plants. Despite their structural diversity, plants produce limited quantities of these valuable products in a metabolic cost-saving way. This has greatly limited their commercial application, and the overexploitation of source plants has raised concerns about their sustainability and highlighted the need for advanced research.
Recent advances in genomics, transcriptomics, proteomics, and metabolomics technologies have revolutionized our understanding of plant biology, enabling the discovery of new plant natural products and their biosynthetic pathways. Functional plant genomics approaches, such as targeted genome mining, genome-wide association studies, co-expression analysis, and virus-induced gene silence approach, have facilitated the identification and characterization of genes and enzymes involved in the biosynthesis of specific natural products. Metabolic engineering approaches have enabled the manipulation of plant metabolism to improve the yield and quality of specific natural products of interest or to produce them in heterologous cultures. These advances have created new opportunities for the sustainable production and utilization of plant natural products.
Topics of interest include the following:
- Elucidating the biosynthetic pathways of plant natural products, such as alkaloids, terpenes, phenolics, etc.
- Identifying and characterizing genes and enzymes involved in the biosynthesis of plant natural products.
- Discovering and characterizing transcription factors responsible for the positive or negative regulation of plant natural product biosynthesis.
- Developing and employing metabolic engineering techniques to improve the yield of specific natural products of interest, or biomanufacturing plant natural products in engineered plants or yeast.
Original research papers and reviews related to these topics will be considered for publication.
Dr. Xiang Pu
Dr. Wei Wu
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 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. 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
- plant
- natural product
- biosynthesis
- metabolic engineering
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