About this Research Topic

Background

Antibiotic-resistant microbes are regarded as one of the world's greatest threats today. Due to the growing number of infections caused by these organisms, experts have estimated that more people will die from bacterial infections than cancer by 2050.

The plant kingdom contains over 422,000 plant species. Being sedentary and lacking an adaptive immune system, plants rely on defensive chemicals to compact predatory microorganisms. Compared to synthetic organic small molecules, natural products have unique scaffolds and structural complexity that usually is not attainable by simple chemistry. Only a small portion of these natural resources have been studied and tested pharmacologically. Thus, natural products represent an untapped reservoir of novel small molecules of privileged structures in drug discovery of antimicrobial agents.

With this Research Topic, we aim at highlighting the latest advances in research related to the antimicrobial properties of natural products.

We welcome submissions that describe current trends and recent advances in discovering novel natural products with antimicrobial activities. These include original research, review, mini-review, brief research report and clinical trial articles on the antimicrobial properties of extracts, fractions, purified compounds, synergistic mixtures against microorganisms encountered in human infectious diseases. In this Research Topic, we encourage also submissions related to the identification of new antimicrobials using novel drug discovery technologies.

Keywords: Natural products, Antibacterials, Antifungals, Antimycobacterials, Small Molecules, Peptides, In Silico Screening, High Throughput Screening

Important note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.

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