Dear Colleagues,

Throughout the evolutionary process, plants have developed biosynthetic pathways to synthesize and accumulate a great variety of secondary metabolites, many of which play a fundamental role in the interactions between living organisms in the natural environment. The specificity of these responses is especially noteworthy, usually showing a differential response depending on the target species. Although synthetic herbicides have been used to eliminate unwanted species in agricultural ecosystems for a century, their massive and indiscriminate use in recent decades has increased soil, air and water pollution, and has induced the evolution of resistant weeds that have been exponentially increasing in the last thirty years. Therefore, the study of natural compounds belonging to different chemical families will increase the chances of finding an effective alternative to synthetic herbicides. As an added value, it should be noted that these molecules tend to play more than one role in the metabolism of the producer plant, so there is a greater probability of finding compounds that have multiple sites of action, valorizing their bioherbicidal capacity.

Knowing the mode of action of phytochemical substances regulating plant growth will allow their use in the control of weeds in the framework of sustainable agriculture, and will provide the industry with new modes of action for the preparation of organic compounds that are more environmentally friendly, which could substitute the traditional herbicides and help to solve the problem of resistance because of their new target sites.

Topics of interest for this Special Issue include but are not limited to:

• Allelopathy;
• Isolation and identification of natural compounds from plants with herbicidal activity;
• Characterization of the primary and secondary effects of plant and plant-derived natural compounds;
• Morphological, physiological, biochemical and molecular perspectives to study the specific modes of action of natural products;
• Identification of the targets and modes of action of pure natural molecules and/or mixtures on weeds’ physiology and metabolism;
• Use of natural products as repellent agents against parasites (e.g., Cuscuta; Orobanche sp.; Striga sp.);
• Use of -omics (genomics, proteomics, metabolomics) technologies to study the modes of action of secondary metabolites;
• Synthesis of ecofriendly natural-product-like compounds with biological activity against weeds.

Dr. Fabrizio Araniti
Dr. Mercedes Verdeguer
Dr. Adela M. Sánchez Moreiras
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.

• secondary metabolites
• mode of action
• natural compounds as bioherbicides
• allelopathy
• essential oils in crop protection
• allelopathic crops
• botanical herbicide
• phytotoxins
• natural herbicide
• biological control
• omics