Medicinal and Edible Plants and Their Natural Products: From Extraction to Bioactivity Evaluation

Dear Colleagues,

The world of medicinal and edible plants has expanded with the emergence of new knowledge, new technologies, and new approaches to this fundamental field of health science. Globalization has introduced new foods, new social habits, and innovative uses for well-known medicinal plants. The advice of Hippocrates, "Man is what he eats," now serves as a guiding principle for consuming healthy food, where bioactive natural products play a vital role. Consistently incorporating foods rich in healthy secondary metabolites is a significant step in preventing metabolic syndromes, including diabetes, hypertension, and inflammation—non-return pathways to non-transmissible diseases that silently affect both developed and transitioning countries. Furthermore, the principles of green chemistry and sustainability have compelled natural product chemists to explore new extraction protocols using environmentally friendly solvents, such as super-critical and high-pressure extractions, the versatility of deep eutectic solvents (DES), ultrasound, and microwave-assisted extractions, which have revealed new profiles of secondary metabolites in well-known plants. Metabolite profiling, in combination with bioinformatics and multivariate statistics, using a metabolomic approach, enables the identification of specific markers of activity within complex mixtures that can be characterized, traced, and quantified. The development of new and powerful instruments, such as high-resolution mass spectrometry, provides significant information on the composition of extracts that must be carefully classified and evaluated when searching for new bioactive compounds. However, it is invaluable for their discovery and for linking them to associated bioactivities. Simultaneously, clinical studies on the effects of medicinal plants are necessary to definitively support the traditional ethnobotanical observations of original populations.

This Special Issue on “Medicinal and Edible Plants and Their Natural Products: From Extraction to Bioactivity Evaluation” welcomes your contributions on all these topics. We hope to make an impact and advance the knowledge in a field that is continuously being rediscovered, and thus provide solutions for a sustainable world.

Prof. Dr. Horacio Heinzen
Prof. Dr. Alvaro Vazquez
Prof. Dr. Eduardo Dellacassa
Guest Editors

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• medicinal and edible plants
• natural products
• secondary metabolites
• metabolite profiling
• mass spectrometry
• bioactivity