Bioinformatics of Marine Natural Products 3.0

Dear Colleagues,

We are glad to announce the third edition of the Special Issue “Bioinformatics of Marine Natural Products”.

In recent decades, marine natural products (MNPs) and their structural analogs have made a significant contribution to pharmacotherapy, especially for cancer diseases. While marine organisms, especially microbes, are still attracting great attention as promising sources for the sustainable production of novel bioactive compounds and biocatalysts, challenges in drug discovery remain, such as technical barriers to screening, isolation, characterization, and the optimization of production. These challenges may be addressed by using genome-mining-based approaches to explore the biosynthetic capacity of microorganisms relying on DNA extraction, sequencing, and bioinformatics analysis. These approaches make the biosynthetic potential of unculturable microbes accessible, which still represent the vast majority. This is a fast-growing research field, and it is predicted to greatly empower the identification of biosynthetic genes in the genomes of producing organisms, eventually leading to the discovery of novel MNPs.

We thus welcome your contribution to this Special Issue to provide a panorama of the current scenario and information on new approaches to explore the huge amount of big datasets to identify the biosynthetic pathways of natural marine compounds.

Dr. Giovanna Romano
Guest Editor

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 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.

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-anonymized peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Marine Drugs is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly 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 2900 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.