Phenolic Profile and Bioactivities of Sideritis perfoliata L.: The Plant, Its Most Active Extract, and Its Broad Biological Properties

Sideritis, also named ironwort, mountain tea, or shepherd's tea, is a genus of flowering plants used as herbal medicine in traditional Mediterranean-area medicine systems, and these plants are generally consumed as a herbal tea. Its use as herbal tea and in traditional herbal medicine is quite popular. There are currently few studies on Sideritis perfoliata L., and only one reports the use of a liquid chromatography coupled to diode array detection and electrospray ionization tandem mass spectrometry (LC-DAD-ESI-MSn) profile and the content of phenolic compounds without considering a possible correlation with its biological activities. This paper aims to investigate the antioxidant activities by means of several different biological/biochemical assays (radical scavenging, reducing power, ferrous ion chelating, and total antioxidant by phosphomolybdenum and beta-carotene bleaching methods) as well as analyze the enzyme inhibitory activities (against AChE (acetylcholinesterase), BChE (butyrylcholinesterase), tyrosinase, alpha-glucosidase, and alpha-amylase) as well as the total phenolics, flavonoids, and condensed tannins. The reported results on Sideritis perfoliata highlighted that methanol and water extracts generally showed higher radical scavenging and reducing power activities. A similar trend could be observed for phosphomolybdenum and ferrous ion chelating activities. Methanol extracts showed lower activity only for the beta-carotene bleaching assay.