Plant Metabolites and Their Synthetic Derivatives as Potential Candidates for the Development of Drugs

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

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• plant extracts
• plant-derived compounds
• biological activity
• antibacterial activity
• drugs development
• synthetic natural product derivatives
• multidrug resistance