Phytochemical studies on the polar fractions of plants belonging to the Lamiaceae family with aspects of chemotaxonomy, ethno-pharmacology, nutraceutics and phytochemical evolution

In this PhD thesis, a comprehensive phytochemical analysis was performed on a series of nineteen plants belonging to the Lamiaceae family. In particular, five Ajuga, three Teucrium, one Galeopsis, two Melittis, two Sideritis and six Stachys species were studied for their content in secondary metabolites in the polar fraction. One hundred and sixty-nine compounds were, respectively, isolated and identified by these species mainly by means of Column Chromatography and by means of NMR Spectroscopy and MS Spectrometry. These phytochemicals belong to thirteen different classes of natural compounds and were even evidenced in more species. Among these, three resulted to be new compounds, identified for the first time during this study. Their presence was important from the chemotaxonomic, ethnopharmacological and nutraceutical points of view. In fact, the chemotaxonomic markers of the family, of specific genera and species were evidenced thus confirming the botanical classification of the studied species under the phytochemical profile. Moreover, these compounds proved to be very useful to justify most of the ethnopharmacological and nutraceutical uses of these species and to also provide possible further ones. Lastly, some of the secondary metabolites found in some species were used to draw two Sporne diagrams correlating phytochemistry and their own evolution. In this case, some concordance between these data with those usually reported in literature in this context, was observed but also a couple of cases of great discordance, thus suggesting to use also phytochemical evolution, together with molecular data, to draw the evolutionary phylogenetic trees of the species in order to have more precise results