Different Approaches in Discovery and Resupply of Plant-Derived Natural Products

Dear Colleagues,

The last several decades have seen an increase in plant-based drug discovery processes. Indeed, natural products possess a superior chemical diversity as compared to synthetic ones, leading to a renewal in the search for new plant-based drugs. In the selection of starting plant material to submit to phytochemical and biological/pharmacological studies, different strategies can be pursued: the classical ethnopharmacological approach based on the traditional medicinal use of plants provides hints for compounds which are therapeutically effective in humans; the chemosystematic or phylogenetic approach, making use of chemotaxonomic knowledge and molecular phylogenetic data in order to select plant species from genera or families known to produce compound classes associated with a certain bioactivity; the ecological approach, based on the observation of interactions between organisms and their environment that might lead to the production of bioactive natural compounds; the random approach, based on the selection of plant species mainly on the basis of their availability (this strategy might be highly advantageous when applied in regions of high biodiversity and endemism, since the chemical diversity of natural products can reflect the biodiversity of their source organisms) ; and computational methods based on the selection of test samples relying on in silico bioactivity predictions for the constituents of certain plant species. This Special Issue aims to collect relevant scientific papers on new possible approaches for the identification, characterization, and resupply of natural products that may address some of the challenges related with the development of plant-based therapeutics.

Dr. Cinzia Sanna
Guest Editor

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