Medicinal plants are an important source of natural active ingredients because they contain thousands of natural active products with novel structures and unique diversities. Bioactive natural products are an important path for drug discovery, and about 24% of approved drugs belong to natural products or their derivatives. At present, although a large number of natural active products are isolated from medicinal plants, there are still many medicinal plants that have not been fully studied and developed. Especially, the pharmacodynamic material basis of some uncommon medicinal plants is not clear, and the structure-activity relationship and mechanism of action are not clarified. These factors have seriously hindered the discovery of new drugs from medicinal plants. Therefore, the discovery of new active molecules from medicinal plants is of great practical significance for the development of new drugs.

The current research topic aims to discover new bioactive natural products from medicinal plants with modern extraction and separation techniques as new active molecules. In light of the current clinical drug needs, integrating technologies and methods of high-throughput screening, molecular docking, metabolomics, serum pharmacology, network pharmacology, natural medicinal chemistry, etc, focusing on the areas of isolation, structural elucidation, biological evaluation, structure-activity relationship, and mechanism, yield improvement of bioactive natural products. The research on medicinal plant resources to expand the existing bioactive natural products, is promoting the development of innovative drugs.

In order to pay more attention to the research status of natural active ingredients in the field of drug research and development, this special issue is set up to focus on the following research directions, but not limited to these contents. When new compounds from medicinal plants are reported, manuscripts describing their biological activity are much preferred.
• Characterization of active ingredients of medicinal plants
• Identification of bioactivity in plant extracts
• Chemistry and biochemistry of bioactive natural products of plant origin
• Development of standardization method for bioactive plant extracts and natural products
• Structure and bioactivities of phytochemicals
• Identification of targets and mechanism of activity of plant extracts
• Structural elucidation of natural products
• Pharmacology of natural products
• Bioassay-guided isolation
• Natural product metabolism
• Natural product biosynthesis

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