Submit to Chemistry Review for Chemistry Propose a Special Issue

Journal Menu

Journal Browser

Discovery of Bioactive Ingredients from Natural Products

Special Issue Editors
Special Issue Information
Keywords
Related Special Issue
Published Papers

A special issue of Chemistry (ISSN 2624-8549). This special issue belongs to the section "Biological and Natural Products".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (30 June 2022) | Viewed by 7909

Share This Special Issue

Special Issue Editors

Dr. Simona Fabroni

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor

Council for Agricultural Research and Economics (CREA)—Research Center for Olive, Fruit and Citrus Crops, Corso Savoia 190, 95024 Acireale, Italy
Interests: citrus bioactive compounds; recovery of high value compounds from fruit processing wastes; mild food processing; quality of foods; traceability of organic food productions
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals

Dr. Krystian Marszałek

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor

Department of Fruit and Vegetable Product Technology, Institute of Agricultural and Food Biotechnology—State Research Institute, 36 Rakowiecka Street, 02532 Warsaw, Poland
Interests: fruits; vegetables; emerging techniques; food processing and preservation; bioaccessibility and bioavailability; high-pressure processing; high-pressure homogenization; high-pressure carbon dioxide; ultrasounds; microwaves; food chemistry
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals

Dr. Aldo Todaro

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor

Department of Agricultural, Food and Forest Sciences, SAAF, Università degli Studi di Palermo, Viale delle Scienze Build 4-I, 90128 Palermo, Italy
Interests: fruit quality; horticultural physiology and preservation recovery of high value compounds from food processing wastes; fruit processing
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

The Mediterranean diet is worldwide recognized as associated to a lower risk of cancer, heart disease and stroke. This lower risk is universally ascribed to the high intake of vegetables and fruits, thus producing an high ingestion of phytochemicals. At present there is a great interest in the development of new nutraceuticals of natural origin to be employed within the pharmaceutical field and/or as dietary supplements. For instance, agri-food industry produces a large amount of wastes which can be conveniently used for the recovery of valuable health-promoting compounds to be used as natural ingredients.

Therefore, this Special Issue of chemistry is dedicated to original research and review articles that cover the latest findings about new extraction techniques for the recovery of bioactive constituents from fruit and/or vegetables, chemical characterization of phytoextracts with valuable biological activity, in-vivo tests and in-vitro bioassays to support biological activity of purified compounds, complex extracts and /or combined extracts deriving from different matrices. Studies aimed at the valorization of bioactive extracts deriving from traditional or ancient plant and/or fruit species are also welcome.

You may choose our Joint Special Issue in Molecules.

Dr. Simona Fabroni
Prof. Dr. Krystian Marszałek
Prof. Dr. Aldo Todaro
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. Chemistry 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 1800 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

Bioactive constituents
Phytoextract
Biological activity

Related Special Issue

Discovery of Bioactive Ingredients from Natural Products in Molecules (15 articles)

Published Papers (3 papers)

Download All Papers

Research

27 pages, 10342 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Natural Products as Mcl-1 Inhibitors: A Comparative Study of Experimental and Computational Modelling Data

by Arvind Negi and Paul V. Murphy

Chemistry 2022, 4(3), 983-1009; https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.3390/chemistry4030067 - 06 Sep 2022

Cited by 6 | Viewed by 2120

Abstract

The human myeloid leukemia cell differentiation protein (hMcl-1) is an anti-apoptotic multi-partner protein, belonging to the B-cell lymphoma-2 (Bcl-2) family of proteins. Studies have linked hMcl-1 alleviated expression with resistance to hemopoietic chemotherapeutics, which makes it a key drug target in blood cancers. However, most of the developed small- to medium-sized hMcl-1 inhibitors have typical off-target activity towards other members of the Bcl-2 family. To improve the hMcl-1 inhibitor design, especially exploring a suitable scaffold with pharmacophoric features, we focused on natural hMcl-1 inhibitors. To date, seven classes of natural compounds have been isolated, which display a low micromolar affinity for hMcl-1 and have limited biophysical studies. We screened hMcl-1 co-crystal structures, and identified nine co-crystal structures of hMcl-1 protein, which were later evaluated by multiple receptor conformations (which indicates that the differences between hMcl-1 in crystal structures are low (RMSD values between 0.52 and 1.13 Å, average RMSD of 0.638–0.888 Å, with a standard deviation of 0.102–0.185Å)), and multiple ligand conformations (which led to the selection of the PDB structure, 3WIX (RMSD value = 0.879 Å, standard deviation 0.116 Å), to accommodate various Mcl-1 ligands from a range of co-crystal PDB files) methods. Later, the three adopted docking methods were assessed for their ability to reproduce the conformation bound to the crystal as well as predict trends in Ki values based on calculated RMSD and docking energies. Iterative docking and clustering of the docked pose within ≤1.0 Å was used to evaluate the reproducibility of the adopted docking methods and compared with their experimentally determined hMcl-1 affinity data. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Discovery of Bioactive Ingredients from Natural Products)

► Show Figures

Figure 1

17 pages, 3485 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Nanoencapsulated Myricetin to Improve Antioxidant Activity and Bioavailability: A Study on Zebrafish Embryos

by Gopikrishna Agraharam, Agnishwar Girigoswami and Koyeli Girigoswami

Chemistry 2022, 4(1), 1-17; https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.3390/chemistry4010001 - 31 Dec 2021

Cited by 25 | Viewed by 3274

Abstract

Flavonoids are natural polyphenolic compounds that mainly possess antioxidant properties due to more hydroxyl groups in their structure and play an important role in combatting many diseases. Myricetin is a flavonoid found in grapes, green tea, fruits, and vegetables and is not only an antioxidant but also is a pro-oxidant. Myricetin is sparingly soluble in water and restricts its properties due to low bioavailability. The present study reports the liposomal nanoformulations of myricetin to improve its bioavailability with reduced pro-oxidant activity. The nanoformulated myricetin was characterized using different photophysical tools, such as dynamic light scattering (DLS), zeta potential, and scanning electron microscopy (SEM). The effect of nanoencapsulated myricetin on the developing zebrafish embryo was studied in terms of microscopic observations, cumulative hatchability, and antioxidant activities, such as catalase, glutathione peroxidase, and superoxide dismutase, after treating the zebrafish embryo with standard oxidant hydrogen peroxide. The results obtained from the cumulative hatchability, developmental studies, and antioxidant assays indicated that the liposomal nanoformulation of myricetin had enhanced antioxidant activity, leading to defense against oxidative stress. The formulation was highly biocompatible, as evidenced by the cumulative hatching studies as well as microscopic observations. The positive effects of liposomal nanoformulation on zebrafish embryos can open an avenue for other researchers to carry out further related research and to check its activities in clinical studies and developmental studies. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Discovery of Bioactive Ingredients from Natural Products)

► Show Figures

Graphical abstract

13 pages, 2886 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Study on Adsorption Performance of Benzoic Acid in Cyclocarya paliurus Extract by Ethyl Cellulose Microspheres

by Yamin Zhao, Lujun Zhang, Xiaoxue Zhai, Qian Liu, Lebing Sun, Mengshi Liu, Lili An, Liang Xian, Ping Zhang and Lihua Chen

Chemistry 2021, 3(4), 1113-1125; https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.3390/chemistry3040081 - 01 Oct 2021

Cited by 1 | Viewed by 1646

Abstract

Polymer microspheres with inter-connecting pores are widely used as microsphere materials. In the study, the ethyl cellulose microspheres (ECM) were prepared by using the solvent-evaporation method. Based on that, a method for the separation and purification of benzoic acid from crude extract of Cyclocarya paliurus was established by the ECM and high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC). The ECM after the sorption equilibrium was desorbed by using 40% methanol as the analytical solvent. The content of benzoic acid in eluent is up to 0.0216 mg/mL, and the benzoic acid can be obtained with a high purity of 82.22%. Furthermore, the adsorption-desorption behavior of benzoic acid onto ECM was investigated. The results of adsorption kinetics of benzoic acid showed that the adsorption followed the pseudo-first-order kinetic model. The ECM was characterized by using Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR), thermogravimetric analysis (TGA), scanning electron microscope (SEM), and X-ray diffraction (XRD). The results showed that the ECM has a high adsorption property due to its more porous structure, phenolic hydroxyl group, and other oxygen-containing functional groups. This method and the ECM can be used stably, continuously, and efficiently to purify the benzoic acid from the methanol extract of C. paliurus on a large scale. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Discovery of Bioactive Ingredients from Natural Products)

► Show Figures