Tussilago farfara L., a perennial species, is a medicinal herb used in traditional medicine, mainly for the treatment of respiratory tract-related pathology. In traditional Chinese medicine, flower buds are preferred; in Europe, the leaves are used; and in some parts of India, the whole plant is utilized. This preferential usage of the plant organs might be based on differences in the chemical composition due to environmental conditions, along with preferred traditional and cultural approaches. In this article, the impact of pedoclimatic growth conditions on the morpho-anatomical development and phytochemical profile of the plant were studied on T. farfara in the vegetative state, collected from two different locations in the Romanian spontaneous flora, revealing significant variations. Furthermore, the antioxidant profile of the specific extracts from the aerial and subterranean plant parts is also in accordance with these discrepancies. The plant anatomy was assessed histologically by optical microscopy, while the analytical chemistry evaluation was based on LC/MS and spectral methods for the evaluation of the antioxidant and enzyme inhibitory activity. To our knowledge, this is the first comparative analysis contextually reporting on the histology, phenolic profile, antioxidant capacity, and geographical location of the vegetative form of T. farfara.

Through its natural or cultivated insular population distribution, Ilex aquifolium L. is a paramount species which is exceptionally suitable for studying phenotypic variability and plasticity through the assessment of morphological, physiological, biochemical and genomic features with respect to acclimation and/or adaptation efficiency. The current study is focused on four insular populations of Ilex aquifolium from Eastern Europe (i.e., in Romania, Hungary, Serbia and Bulgaria), and presents an initial evaluation of phenotypic variability in order to conclude our research on phylogenetic relationships and phytochemical profiles, including several descriptive and quantitative morphological traits. Taken together, the data from different methods in this paper indicate that the Bulgarian and Romanian populations can be distinguished from each other and from Serbian and Hungarian populations, while the latter show a higher level of resemblance with regards to their quantitative morphological traits. It is likely that these morphological traits are determined through some quantitative trait loci implicated in stress responses generated by light, temperature, soil water, soil fertility and salinity conditions that will need to be analysed in terms of their physiological, genomic and metabolomics traits in future studies.

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