Molecular and Physiological Regulation of Secondary Metabolism in Vegetables (3rd Edition)

A special issue of Plants (ISSN 2223-7747). This special issue belongs to the section "Plant Physiology and Metabolism".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: 30 December 2025 | Viewed by 52

Special Issue Editors


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Guest Editor

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
Department of Horticulture, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou 310058, China
Interests: brassica vegetables; postharvest quality; glucosinolates; regulation; plant hormones
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Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

Vegetables are closely related to daily human life. They not only add decoration to food with their colorful appearance but also have positive effects on health with their comprehensive and rich nutrition, especially bioactive compounds from secondary metabolism. Vegetables contain a variety of secondary metabolites, including carotenoids, flavonoids, glucosinolates, and anthocyanins, among others. These secondary metabolites are widely involved in growth and development, resistance against biotic and abiotic stresses, quality characteristics and formation, and other physiological processes of vegetable crops. Likewise, they can be influenced by intrinsic genetic factors, extrinsic environmental factors, and postharvest handling. In model plants, significant progress has been made in understanding the biosynthesis, degradation, and regulation of secondary metabolites; however, major gaps regarding vegetable crops remain in the literature. Today, the genomic sequence of an increasing number of vegetable crops has been explored, facilitating the elucidation of the regulatory mechanisms of secondary metabolites in vegetable crops together with other technologies, such as omics (transcriptomics, proteomics, metabolomics, epigenomics, etc.), gene-editing technologies (ZFNs, TALENs, CRISPR, etc.), and bioinformatics. Therefore, in this Special Issue, we invite the submission of articles (original research papers, perspectives, hypotheses, opinions, reviews, and methods) that focus on the regulatory mechanisms of secondary metabolism and their role in vegetable growth and development, as well as responses to environmental stresses, quality characteristics and changes at the transcriptomic, proteomic, metabolomic, and epigenetic levels.

Prof. Dr. Bo Sun
Dr. Huiying Miao
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
  • biosynthesis, degradation, and regulation
  • growth and development
  • biotic and abiotic stress responses
  • quality characteristics
  • postharvest
  • gene function
  • omics studies
  • gene editing
  • bioinformatics

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