Marine Natural Product Artefacts: Valuing an Unnatural Window into New Chemical Space
A topical collection in Marine Drugs (ISSN 1660-3397).
Viewed by 6525Editor
Interests: biodiscovery; marine and microbial natural products chemistry; biomimetic synthesis
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Topical Collection Information
Dear Colleagues,
Virtually all natural products researchers at one time or another in their career serve as either an author or reviewer (and on rarer occasions, editor) of natural product manuscripts, as an advisor and/or examiner of natural products research students, or as an applicant and/or assessor of natural product grant applications. In all these endeavours, individual attitudes, perceptions and even prejudices play an important role, albeit informed by specialist disciplinary knowledge and expertise. For example, after several decades as an active natural products scientist, I continue to be amazed at the range of highly polarized attitudes that exist towards natural product artifacts. In this context, artifacts are substantive structure transformation products, from natural products, induced during extraction, fractionation, analysis, handling and/or storage. The spectrum of positions held on artifacts range from artifact celebrants, who actively seek to detect, derive value from, and report on encounters with artifacts; to artifact ignorers, who are seemingly oblivious to the existence of artifacts, which they routinely misrepresent as natural products; to artifact deniers, who accept the existence of artifacts, which they dismiss as mere "processing mistakes", ill-deserving of inclusion in the scientific literature. As an unapologetic artifact celebrant, in this short introductory review I seek to stimulate discussion on the potential benefits that accrue from studying artifacts, and in doing so attract original submissions and associated commentary on informative encounters with artifacts in marine natural products science.
Although the alternate spelling, "artifact" and "artefact", appear in the natural products literature, the term "artifact" is currently far more common. In the interests of consistency, we request that all manuscript submissions to this Topical Collection use the "artifact" spelling.
Prof. Robert Capon
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 collection 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. 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.
Keywords
- Marine natural products
- Artifact
- Chemical reactivity
- Chemical ecology
- Chemical communication
- Prodrugs
