Plant Metabolites and Their Synthetic Derivatives as Potential Candidates for the Development of Drugs
A special issue of Plants (ISSN 2223-7747).
Deadline for manuscript submissions: 31 July 2026 | Viewed by 536
Special Issue Editors
Interests: plant-derived products; antibacterial activity; anticancer activity; enzyme inhibitors; inhibitors of MDR efflux pumps; bioguided isolation
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Interests: small organic molecules; natural products; anticancer and antibacterial agents; multitarget inhibitors; hybrids; bioconjugates
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Special Issue Information
Dear Colleagues,
Since ancient times, plant-derived products have been used as traditional medicines, becoming an essential source of drugs. The significant potential of plants, the majority of which remains unexplored, for providing new active chemical entities encourages scientists to continue researching them. These structures could become promising scaffolds to inspire the design and development of novel therapeutic leads able to enrich libraries to be used in drug discovery pipelines.
This Special Issue intends to collect cutting-edge research and review works illustrating the potential of plant products to reflect upon the approaches of such drug discoveries and bring together organic chemists, pharmacognocists, pharmacologists, toxicologists, biologists, artificial intelligence experts, computer-aided drug design scientists, and clinicians working as a multidisciplinary team in the area of natural products.
We do hope that this Special Issue will provide extensive and applied knowledge of interest to scientists, such that they contribute to finding new avenues to develop potential therapeutic agents of natural origin against diseases.
Potential topics include but are not limited to the following:
- Characterization of compounds obtained from plants with activity against pathogenic microorganisms, enzymes, or cancer;
- In vitro screening of an important number of plant extracts with activity against pathogenic microorganisms, enzymes, or cancer;
- In vivo models for testing plant-derived products with activity against pathogenic microorganisms, enzymes, or cancer;
- Mechanisms of action of plant-derived compounds active against pathogenic microorganisms, enzymes, or cancer;
- Computer-aided drug design (CADD) as a virtual tool for the screening and prediction of bioactive compounds;
- Evaluation of synergy among bioactive chemical compounds (plant-derived and synthetic);
- Synthetic derivatives of bioactive plant-derived compounds accompanied by their biological evaluation data and corresponding structure–activity relationship studies (SARSs).
Prof. Dr. María Cecilia Carpinella
Prof. Dr. Constantinos Athanassopoulos
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 extracts
- plant-derived compounds
- biological activity
- antibacterial activity
- drugs development
- synthetic natural product derivatives
- multidrug resistance
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