Call for Papers: Informatics Strategies in Natural Products — Tools, Technologies, and Applications

Journal of Natural Products (JNP) is welcoming submissions for an upcoming Special Issue on Informatics Strategies in Natural Products — Tools, Technologies, and Applications. Informatics platforms are playing an ever-increasing role in the study of natural products. The integration of statistical and computational methods to explore, classify and interpret complex experimental datasets is leading to the discovery of new natural product structures and functions in all subject areas, from analytical chemistry to zymology. Coupled with the dramatic rise in the breadth and complexity of tasks that can be addressed using AI/ML-based approaches, this is leading to a rapid restructuring of the ways in which natural products are discovered and studied. This Special Issue presents a collection of articles focused on the development and application of informatics platforms in natural products science. The collection covers the full breadth of informatics strategies in this area, from data integration to discovery.

For readers, this Special Issue will be an easily identifiable source of high-quality papers describing new approaches and impact of computational methods in natural products research. For authors, the Special Issue will provide a venue of increased visibility for their work.

Target topics appropriate for this Special Issue include but are not limited to:

• Databases (creation, exploration, data accuracy and consistency, literature curation)
• Bioinformatics and integration with -omics data (multi-omics approaches, deorphanization of compounds and BGCs, genomic markers of pathway elicitation, bioinformatics-guided biosynthetic pathway engineering, generative methods for engineering BGCs (e.g. protein or DNA sequence generative models), prediction of pathway regulation and engineerability)
• Spectroscopy and structure determination (spectral prediction (NMR and/or MS/MS), structure prediction, dereplication strategies)
• Bioactivity prediction/ assignment (Health/Agricultural activity prediction, ecological roles of natural products)
• Chemoinformatics (prediction of pharmacokinetic properties, generative methods for exploring chemical space)
• New discovery modalities (evolution-guided natural product discovery, AI-assisted NP research, foundation models / LLMs for natural products)

Organizing Editors

Prof. Hyunwoo Kim, Guest Editor
Dongguk University, Republic of Korea

Dr. Barbara Terlouw, Guest Editor
Technical University of Eindhoven, The Netherlands

Prof. Alison Walker, Guest Editor
Vanderbilt University, United States

Prof. Mingxun Wang, Guest Editor
University of California Riverside, United States

Prof. Roger G. Linington, Associate Editor, JNP
Simon Fraser University, Canada

Submission Information

We welcome submissions for this Special Issue through November 30, 2026. For more information on submission requirements, please visit the journal’s Author Guidelines page.

Accepted manuscripts for consideration in this Special Issue will include full-length research Articles, shorter Notes, comprehensive Reviews, and focused Perspectives. For all Reviews and Perspectives, or if you have any general questions about a topic’s suitability, please send a pre-submission inquiry to the Editor-in-Chief (eic@jnp.acs.org).

Papers accepted for publication for this Special Issue will be available ASAP (as soon as publishable) online. After all submissions have been published, they will then be compiled online on a dedicated landing page to form the Special Issue. Manuscripts submitted for consideration will undergo the full rigorous peer review process expected from ACS journals.

Open Access: There are diverse open access options for publications in American Chemical Society journals. Please visit our Open Science Resource Center for more information.

How to Submit

• Log in to the ACS Publishing Center.
• Select your manuscript type; upload your manuscript and related files.
• Review the title and abstract fields to ensure any pre-populated information has uploaded correctly.
• Under "Special Issue Selection," select Informatics Strategies in Natural Products — Tools, Technologies, and Applications.
• Confirm all other information has uploaded correctly.
• Submit your article.

If you have any general questions regarding submission to this Special Issue, please contact eic@jnp.acs.org.