SARANDREA Marco & C S.r.l. is a company in the Frosinone province that produces fresh officinal plant extracts that meet the highest quality standards of the Italian phyto-therapeutic art. The production chain starts from the selection of the harvesting area, preferring those of wild nature, with exclusively autochthonous vegetation.

The Azienda Agricola Fibreno Officinali was established to supply quality raw materials of Italian origin to herbal and pharmaceutical laboratories. Since 2015, the production line obtained by natural drying of plants grown on the farm and harvested in wild state in the territory of the Ernici mountains has been developed. Cultivation follows the principles of good agricultural practice (GAP) and organic methodology, choosing seeds from non-GMO plants and using only products of organic origin for their cultivation. Spontaneous harvesting has been authorized on a wooded and grazing area of approximately 240 ha, in the territory of the Ernici mountains, that have long been known for their wealth of officinal plant species to formulate the herbal remedies of the monastic tradition.

The HERBA SAPIENS company is an artisanal phytocosmetics laboratory, a cosmetics laboratory that uses as its primary ingredient, medicinal plants from spontaneous collection or organic cultivation, following strictly natural and artisanal methods. The plants are harvested by hand during their balsamic time  in places far from city pollution respecting their natural habitat, and then used to create delicate, safe, and effective natural cosmetics.

The project is organized in 4 phases

Collection: Burdock, Melissa and Tarassaco samples were cultivated in southern Lazio (Isola del Liri, FR), and were supplied  by the Fibreno Officinali company.

Arctium iappa: two different types of burdock roots namely organic cultivated and wild conventional downstream and upstream were collected. The organically cultivated burdock was harvested on 12/10/2021, whereas the downstream wild burdock was harvested on 15/12/2021.

Melissa Officinalis: three different ecotypes of Melissa officinalis namely, conventional upstream cultivation, conventional downstream cultivation, and organic cultivation were collected. These ecotype were  harvested at end of May.

Tarassacum officinale: Two ecotypes of Taraxacum officinale were harvested in October, the period of their complete maturity. In the sample preparation the first step was to separate the leaves from the roots and then both aerial part and root part were washed with water to remove every dirty residue.

Extraction: Samples were extracted following the Bligh-Dyer method for the NMR characterization, whereas for HPLC-DAS analysis an optimized a green protocol comprising a H2O/EtOH (30:70 % v/v) mixture was applied.

Characterization: In 2016 a previous project allowed the creation of an OPENLAB SAPIENZA, a network between several Sapienza research groups with different expertise and know-how, setting up the multimethodological-multidisciplinary approach applied to different matrices. This analytical protocol was applied and improved within FITO-BIO project for the characterization of the selected medicinal plants.

Dissemination: FITO-BIO provides:

At the end of the project, a conference is organized for the dissemination of the  results. The conference is be open to the world of scientific research, agricultural companies, processing companies, sector operators and stakeholders to show the news and developments of the project and  to inform and train operators on the use of the results generated by the project in a wider context.

Meeting with companies involved in the project in order to monitor the different steps of the project and to overcome critical issues.

Scientific articles published in international and national journals.

Dissemination brochures of the project with the description of the results and images of the different phases of the project.