Research on Natural Toxins from Plants and Food

Dear Colleagues,

Natural toxins can act as defense mechanisms of plants through their infestation with toxin-producing mold or through ingestion by animals of toxin-producing microorganisms. They can be present in a variety of different crops and foodstuffs. Natural toxins can cause a variety of adverse health effects and pose serious threats to both humans and livestock. Acute poisoning can cause allergic reactions to severe stomachache, diarrhea, and even death, while long-term health consequences include effects on immune, reproductive, or nervous systems, as well as cancer.

Natural toxins not only pose risks to both human and animal health but also impact food security and nutrition by reducing people’s access to healthy food. Thus, future research on the implementation of emerging technologies is required, with additional scientific work on food processing methods that are effective against these naturally occurring plant food toxicants.

This Special Issue aims to cover various aspects (including protocols to evaluate the safety of food crops for human and animal consumption; preventive control management components of hazard analyses and risk-based preventive controls for processed human food and animal feed; sensitive and selective analytical methods to be used for the determination, isolation, purification, and characterization of natural toxins from natural resources, as well as in human- and animal-processed food/feed and bioactive ingredients; and in vitro, in vivo, and in silico bioassay models to investigate the effects on immune, reproductive, or nervous systems, and to estimate how such biological molecules can modulate metabolic processes and have potential adverse health effects on humans and animals.

Dr. Felipe Ascencio
Dr. Norma Y. Hernández-Saavedra
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. Molecules 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 2700 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.

• aquatic biotoxins
• cyanogenic glycosides
• furocoumarins
• lectins
• mycotoxins
• pyrrolizidine alkaloids
• solanines and chaconine