cookie-monster

No it doesn't disociate in water to give 2 H+. In water it reacts as : H20 + H2SO4 = H3O+ + HSO4- If you keep titrating with a strong base you will lead to: H3O+ + HSO4- + 2OH- = SO4-- and 2H2O. The first proton disociates at the pH of the pKa1 value and the second proton at the pH of pKa2. It will take a strong alkali metal base like sodium hydroxide to get that 2nd proton free. The old system of rating acids by normality rather than molarity is the source of this confusion. Under this old system 1 molar sulphuric acid was classified as 2N, because it had 2 protons to give. But the second proton is not as reactive and takes a strong base to dislodge it. In a typical chem lab lesson they will have you titrate the acid with base and under these conditions you will remove the second proton. But if you are adjusting the pH of water or forming amine salts you will only be dealing with the first proton. I too like HCl for its relative ease of evaporation but regardless of what you use it really is important to titrate the added acid as the need to evaporate excess can lead to substantial degredation of the more delicate organic molecules. It really is a matter of doing the homework on your desired extract to see what is suitable.

OMG this info is so wrong that I have to speak up.How protic an acid is refers to the number of acidic protons it has. Sulphuric acid has 2. They are the 2 Hs in H2SO4. It will form a salt by binding to each amine group within your alkaloid, once. The salt will be designated as (alkaloid.HSO4) not a salt of ((alkaloid)2.SO4). It takes a much more powerful reagent than an amine to displace the 2nd acidic group from a diprotic acid. If your alkaloid has more than one amino group the acid will bind with each. Sulphuric acid is also very destructive to complex organic molecules, reducing them to elemental carbon (tar). Simple orgainics like speed and ecstasy are made into hydrochloride and sulphate salts but complex organic molecules are generally converted to tartrates and citrates due to their ease of purification and lack of destruction of the parent chemical. An additional problem is that strong mineral acids also form complexes with the waters of hydration that the salt has. This bound acid and water will require a temperature of around 300 C to drive it off. This temp is totally incompatible with the salt resulting in reduction to elemental carbon (tar). A caustic acid is the best example of an oxymoron that I've seen in years! In summary simple alkaloids such as ephedra can be converted to salts of mineral acids but more complex orgainic chemicals such as LSAs have to be made into organic acid salts.

Lower amides are very soluble in water. The higher amides are sparingly soluble but the very high ratio of water to amide ensures they are extracted. The solvated lower amides also serve to encourage the higher amides into the solution. A little heat will also help their solubility. Acetone is extremely effective at non-specific extractions provided it is compatible. If the material is dried a little water will help increase solubilities in the acetone. I have no idea if acetone reacts directly with LSAs but I doubt it would. The big advantage to using an alcohol or lower ketone is the rapid evaporation at room temp. Using heat to evaporate the water is going to create very harsh conditions for this and any other unstable amides. Why does everyone doubt the purity of OTC methanol???? It is sold for high performance engines and needs to be very pure to prevent damage to the engines. It is dirt cheap too at around $33 per 20 litres. Anywhere that sells it will also supply you an MSDS that applies to the actual product being sold. This will confirm the purity. Methylated spirits is not a formula set in stone. There are many different denaturants used. Most today contain MIBK only but the only way to know whats in a particular brand is to source the MSDS for that particular brand. An MSDS has to be available on request by law.

Actually water is considerably more polar than alcohols. The longer the carbon chain in the alcohol the less polar the solvent becomes. Degradation would have to increase with increasing temp. So the higher the boiling point of the solvent the more degradation when evaporating. If you have enough apparatus to seal your evaporation vessel a cheap plastic water aspirator (10 bucks on ebay) would allow you to remove water at about 40 degrees. Storage of extracts is just not worthwhile because of degradation and any solvent would probably speed this up. The losses are too extreme to justify the convienience. Better to prepare fresh as required. Instead of doing a full extraction what about simply preparing a tea when required?

No its the other way around CaCl2 forms complexes with amines and alcohols. MgSO4 is the OTC product of choice for amines and alcohols. I had a chat a few years back with the manager of Ace Chemicals in Adelaide regarding the likelyhood of distiling pure EtOH from methylated spirits. He assured me that I would not achieve a separation of the MIBK from the EtOH even with fractional distilation. He told me that the industrial grades of methylated spirits contain 2% MIBK to make them unpotable and that there was no MeOH in these grades.

Couldn't resist throwing my 2 cents worth in. Methanol 99% pure, water under 1%, is available OTC from fuel suppliers in 20L drums for $33. No blue colouring. Thank the drag racers for this one. Just imagine how fast impurities would gum up their engines. Methanol is striking fear into peoples hearts because lots of people have died drinking it. Most of these people ingested it either through poor technique in making spirits or by drinking methylated spirits. This is why they no longer contain methanol. Whilst this is true its LD50 is a lot higher than many things you are in daily contact with (and almost certainly your desired compound). Shit water is toxic at a high enough dosage. There is a big difference between drinking the shit and coming into contact with trace amounts. Dri-rite and the like are Calcium chloride, which is unsuitable for drying alcohols as it forms a complex with them. You need magnesium sulphate (epson salts). You must first dry them in the oven on high for a couple of hours or until the glass like appearance has changed to a chalky white. Use a pyrex dish and stir occasionally to avoid big clump formation. Another clue to when its dry is that the clumps stop forming. For extractions simply filtering of the MgSO4 afterwards will surfice, no need to redistil. Methanol is more polar than ethanol and generally a stronger extraction solvent. There is more to this than just the solubility of your desired compound in the solvent. The ability of the solvent to break down cellular structures and free the compounds is also critical. In developing a strategy for extracting a compound it is likely that the most successful proceedure will involve using the strongest solvent that your compound will tolerate. If you find references that state methanol was used I would dive straight in and use it. Acetone is a far superior solvent for plant tissue extractions but it can be harsh on some compounds and a little non-specific.

The oil floating is the denaturant. It will also evaporate as by design its boiling point is +/- 2 degrees that of ethanol azeotrope. It is hanging around as the ethanol evaporates because the EtOH is more volatile than the denaturant. You would probably have to heat to between 80 - 90 degrees to remove all traces of the EtOH and the denaturant. Water would probably be a good extraction solvent as the LSAs are fairly polar but you might experience losses when evaporating. Acetone is excellent as a plant extraction solvent although it can be a little nonspecific, removing a lot more compounds from the plant tissue than ROHs or H2O. It is very clean in its industrial form, evaporating without residue and at low temperature. If the goal is simply to extract the LSAs it should be good. If you are processing the extract to a pure sample of LSA the array of compounds it extracts may make separation tedious.

Hi Auxin. If your old chemistry professor could hear you he would shake his head in dismay. Perhaps things like Raoult's law aren't taught at your universities but they certainly are in all the civilised countries. Raoult's law states that a molecules vapour pressure above a boiling solution is proportional to its mole percentage within the solution boiling. Every uni level text has a section on this. Deviations of Raoult's law are common and explained by intermolecular attractions such as but not exclusively azeotropes. In these chapters the exceptions are explained and a comparison of methanol/water and ethanol/water solutions is usually shown graphically to illustrate the difference between a azeotropic system and a non azeotropic system. Unfortunately my text books were recently confiscated so I cant give you a ref from a current text but I do have an old classic - Laboratory Experiments in Organic Chemistry 7th Ed by Roger Adams, johnson and wilcox. Check pages 21 to 27 for a full explanation.

The concept of impurities depressing a boiling point is well known in chemistry. The idea that an azeotropes boiling point changes depending on its % in the solution is wrong. An azeotrope like any other species has a defined boiling point. Methanol does not form an azeotrope with water. I didn't pull the idea out of thin air. It is a well known fact to any chemist. You wont find a paper on it written this century. Check a uni level chem textbook to confirm this one for yourself. The 30 odd degree difference in boiling points means you will still need a fractionating column to seperate it cleanly though. With a good fractionating column you will see the methanol come over at its boiling point followed by the water at 100 degrees. The temperature of the solution boiling under the column will conform to your Merck data as the distillation progresses.

100% methylated spirits is exactly that 100% denatured alcohol. I had a long chat about this with a major chem supplier in SA. He told me that the denaturant was only to make the product taste to bad to drink. It is not toxic but all the approved denaturants boil within 1 degree of ethanol to prevent distillation being used. The notion that you are going to use 100% ethanol at home is laughable. Firstly I promise you anyone who thinks they've got some is wrong. EtOH forms an aezeotrope with water at 95% but the real problem is how hydrophillic it is. If you have ever opened the bottle it is no longer 100%. If its been in aplastic bottle for a year it would also have absorbed appreciable amounts of water. And the problem doesn't stop at 95%. EtOH will suck the water out of the air until its concentration is way below this. If your chemistry calls for a dry alcohol expect to either have a $20K flushed nitrogen dry box or be doing everything with syringes through septums. All this is a bit fancy for a biological extraction though. Any proceedure calling for alcohol is refering to 95% EtOH. The biological material is going to contain water to start with. The 5% water is bound as an aezeotrope and not readily available to interfere. It takes a powerful reagent like sodium metal or CaO to interupt this relationship with water. The question of toxins is quite redundant when you compare the LD50s of the denaturant with the LSAs. I would personally go with methanol. Available in a high grade for $33 per 20L at local fuel supplier. Look in the phone book under gas suppliers. These companies are everywhere in outer metropolitan areas. They sell bulk fuel and gas. It does not form an aezeotrope with water so is very dry even in the technical grades. It is a more polar solvent than EtOH or IprOH. Yes it is toxic. 10mL can send you blind and 30mL can kill. A residue in your prep will not harm you though. It is not carcinogenic. I'll bet you would ingest more in a day at the drag races than you would from your extraction.

I like the definition that the body can process it to the active. Although that leaves all the methyl amphetamines out of the definition. If we make the carbon skeleton obligatory we let ephedrine in. I wonder if the liver enzymes can dehydroxylate? Probably not as they tend to make molecules more polar for excretion, which is why we see amination as part of the clearance process. I'm still a little confused it seems to be a bit like porn - Cant define it but know it when you see it.

Given the natural occurance of Benzaldehyde, phenyl acetic acid and cinnamyl species do we not have to consider MA and A also essential amphetamines? :confused:

The hydro filter costs anywhere from $80 to $600 for carbon filtration and is made to cope with a high air flow. They are a fantastic addition to any exhaust fan. They will definately stop your neighbours from smelling your cook. But it will do nothing for the smell in the room. If you pull apart a cheap hydro job it is pretty 'ghetto' in its construction. The little adaption I described I have used with only a few inches of carbon in the end of a 3/4" pipe. I have used these things for days on end and the charcoal still soaks up everything thrown at it. The amount of odour a handful of crushed charcoal will absorb is absolutely unbelievable. If you're cooking drugs or growing dope a hydro filter on your exhaust is compulsory. If not its a nice but extravagant accessory. It will prevent odour leaving the kitchen when you have to open the pot. If you want to use a hydro job and loose the nausea in the kitchen you will still have to adapt a vent from your pot to the filter. Making a hole in the pot lid and running a pipe into the inlet of your filter will surfice.

Here's a couple I pulled of a quick google: http://members.aol.com/aromavitae/variation.html http://www.kau.edu/pop/medicinalplants.htm While looking for them I found a few that said it made no difference. I have old lecture notes where it was presented that drying allowed a high level of mechanical disruption to be applied to the plant tissues. This makes sense to me as when damaged plant tissues 'bruise' this process is a catabolic salvage pathway and could easily damage fragile components. In the absence of liquid water the degradation pathways are severely inhibited. I would think that if you droped some plant material in a blender and liquified it that the pH of the resulting sludge would change every hour. As many plants dont show an increase in yield when dried I think that perhaps the plants which benefit from drying are the ones where the oil is contained deep within their tissues and in the plants where the oil is located in epidermal glands drying makes no difference. I think if you need to achieve cellular disruption to obtain the oil then boiling would be inefficient. It seems to me that if you achieved total cellular disruption of the tissues then you would find a sludge in your distilation vessel afterwards. The only time you see this is when you dry and powder the plant materials beforehand.

In a seminar about 6 years ago I heard about genetically engineered proteins of very high molecular weight that are engineered with multiple specific sites, which can bind a range of drugs. These proteins are too large to leave the bloodstream. Any ingested drugs would be bound to these proteins and unable to gain access to the brain and so you would be unable to get stoned or addicted. It is proposed that parents could have their children immunised against drug addiction with these proteins. Back then this had progressed to animal trials.