Microbial Bioactive Metabolites: Extraction, Purification, Characterization and Its Pharmacological Relevance

Dear Colleagues,

The isolation of natural products that originate as secondary metabolites from a myriad of sources, including plants, animals, marine organisms, and microorganisms, is a growing field, particularly due to the potential application of these natural products in pharmacology and medicine. These structurally and chemically diverse molecules act as a remarkable class of therapeutics to treat various diseases. Currently, antimicrobial resistance threatens the effective prevention and treatment of an ever-increasing range of infections caused by bacteria, parasites, viruses, and fungi. Thus, there is an urgent need to find novel antibiotics to fight against these microbial pathogens. Currently, interest in natural products as drug leads is being revived, particularly for tackling antimicrobial multi-drug resistance. Over two-thirds of clinically approved antibiotics, or their semisynthetic derivatives, are natural compounds. Moreover, more than 40% of the bioactive metabolites isolated from plants and microbes are widely used as drugs.

This Special Issue covers the microbial production of these biologically active secondary metabolites and the generation of new molecules using diverse bioactivity-guided extraction, purification, and structural determination approaches. A full elucidation of the structure of naturally occurring secondary metabolites is achieved via spectroscopic techniques, including full 2D-NMR datasets as well as high-resolution mass spectroscopy. Additionally, applications of cutting-edge developments and technological advances in the microbial production of bioactive natural products are desirable.

We cordially invite you to contribute your original research as well as review articles to this Special Issue, which aims to critically explore and examine the biological and medicinal significance of microbial metabolites, as well as methods of isolation, characterization, and the analysis of generated molecules.

Dr. Abbas G. Shilabin
Guest Editor

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• natural products
• secondary metabolites
• soil bacterium
• drug discovery
• pharmacological properties