| Summary: | Aromatic, medicinal and spice plants are immense and sustainable resources of natural compounds with various beneficial properties; they have been used for food flavouring, preservation, nearly all-medicinal therapies, and other applications since prehistoric times. Some of these plants are now grown commercially to produce a variety of valuable ingredients. However, some medicinal and aromatic herbs, Calamintha grandiflora, Myrrhis odorata and Tussilago farfara among them, for various reasons have not found wider application and sometimes are referred to as the “forgotten plants”. Search of new natural bioactive compounds for nutraceuticals, pharmaceuticals, cosmetics and other products has led to the increase in bio-prospecting, i.e. collection, investigation and utilization of diverse biological resources; therefore, it is reasonable to revisit the “forgotten plants” in order to assess their applicability more systematically. Many medicinal and aromatic plants contain large amounts of antioxidants, such as polyphenols, which may play an important role in foods and human body in absorbing and neutralizing free radicals, quenching singlet and triplet oxygen, or decomposing hazardous peroxides. The occurrence of medicinal and aromatic plants and their composition depends on many factors, particularly on the climatic conditions and the type of soil. The biogenesis of biologically active compounds also depends on several factors: origin of the plant, geographical growing zone, its genotype, phenotype, and chemotype as well as annual climatic fluctuations. Most of natural compounds possess several biological activities: antioxidant, antimicrobial, anti-inflammatory, and others. Therefore, the comparison of the selected plant species grown in different geographical sites in order to assess their biological properties is an interesting and important task, particularly for the valorization of such plants for their commercial cultivation. Another important task for the valorization of less widely used plants is their rational processing following the rule “more valuable products and less waste”. The residues and/or by-products obtained during processing of raw plant materials may represent potential natural resources for antioxidants and other valuable substances. For instance, during distillation of aromatic plants for essential oil recovery the wastes may constitute up to 99.5% of the raw material, which currently are used rather inefficiently. There is increasing evidence that the nonvolatile compounds present in such residues may possess various activities, which might be applied in foods as antioxidant and antimicrobial additives and for preventing various diseases such as cancer, atherosclerosis and neurological disorders. The by-products of Calamintha grandiflora, Myrrhis odorata and Tussilago farfara from different origins, as it may be judged from the available literature, have not been studied until now. Furthermore, the variation of bioactive compounds from different origins is an important task both from the chemical point of view and for optimization of the production of bioactive functional ingredients. Therefore, these species, which sometimes are referred as «Medieval forgotten plants» growing in Lithuania and south of France, were selected in this study as candidates for the production of valuable ingredients and characterisation of their composition and properties, because in Medieval times these plants were the basis for food flavouring, preservation and nearly all-medicinal therapy until synthetic drugs were developed in the nineteenth century. However, very little information is known about the natural compounds present in these plants. Therefore, it is very important to analyse them and to assess their biological properties.
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