CONICET | Buscador de Institutos y Recursos Humanos

Our country was one of the pioneers from Mercosur to define and regulate all activities involving plant drugs (PD) and their products (preparations and phytotherapic medicines, FM) (1-4). Thus, the current regulatory, in agreement with the WHO guidelines (5, 6), sets that the guarantee of quality, safety and efficacy of the PD and its products, is based on three fundamental aspects, besides the application of GMP: 1) Botanical identification with scientific name, recognizing their morphological and micrographic characteristics (Botanical quality control). 2) Identification and quantification of the active principles (AP) if they are known or alternatively identifying against chromatographic patterns (Chemical quality control). 3) Hygienic Control, which means that the product is suitable for human consumption. When the laboratories of products based on medicinal plants have to perform the botanical and chemical quality control of native PD, face the problem of the lack or inaccessibility to botanical descriptions (morphological and micrographic) and chemical studies that identify the PA or any chemical marker. This is compounded by the lack of chromatographic patterns, especially for native plants, whose PA are unknown. The objectives of this work are: a) Collect all botanical, chemical and biological information, scientific as "traditional", existing about three species of Baccharis: two species encoded in FA VI as "carqueja": Baccharis crispa Spreng. and Baccharis articulata (Lam.) Pers (7), and a third species: B. trimera (Less) DC. b) Perform chemical profiles of PD by several chromatographic techniques, identifying if it is possible some chemical compound that allows the characterization of each species and in turn its differentiation from the other two (chemical marker).