so i understand dopamine is far from pragmatic to obtain.
but for some reason i was pondering the injection of dopamine (which obviously would never work) that you hear referenced regarding increasing mesc. content.

and i had a thought: what if you took a cutting, and rubbed dopamine powder on the wound of the cut before it calloused. clearly this wouldn't be something you could do regularly (at least not to the same cactus), but would am i correct in assuming that it would indeed give it a bit of a boost? (probably not any more than an alkaloid stressing technique, but still)

Is dopamine water soluble? Maybe misting it with a saturated solution would work?

dopamine hcl is water soluble, but i don't think it would absorb through the skin

Banana peels when green can contain a rather signifigant amount of dopamine.

Why not blend fresh cactus, mix with dopamine solution and a bit of citric acid, pH at 5.5 and see if upon extraction you can demonstrate loss of dopamine?
Start with 5g dopamine and see if after such treatment you can recover all 5g?

Too bad making a cell free extract is not easy.

Dopamine should absorb through the skin in solution.

if that is the case, getting dopamine into a cactus should be relatively easy then.

Place a dehydrated living cutting into a solution of dopamine and let it soak up water.
However it may not get to the right enzymes or they might not activate as desired.

Something akin to a fermentation might be worth looking into for this.

I have been wondering about this topic for awhile and would love to see some experimentation. Sadly i lack cactus right now.i only have seeds.

here is a scalpel, pereskiopsis, and some vaseline.

now get to graftin

I do not like grafting.

I have seen good seed grow a plant a meter tall in under three years in good conditions so when i get started again i can have a ton of cacti without grafting in a short amount of time.

Grafting only takes a year off that IME.

I will work on this experiment in a couple of years.

I know somebody who is currently doing experiments with tyrosine and DMSO. In the past there have been experiements with injecting tyrosine into cacti, but this just resulted in rot. I believe transdermal patches are being made with DMSO and tyrosine and being placed on grafted plants to see if it increases potency. I guess the DMSO allows the tyrosine to get through the skin.

I've been doing experiments with GA3 solution sprayed on loph grafts. I'm getting plants to 5-6cm in just 6-7 months. If I could somehow increase the potency it would be pretty amazing.

wouldn't your typical stressing techniques increase alkaloid content?

or do you mean a method of increasing potency without affecting growth..?

Yes, that's what I mean. Stressing the grafts would result in slower growth I'd think. But even stressing wouldn't bring the alkaloid content up to that of a plant that size on it's own roots. I wouldn't think anyways.

Although I could just blast some Kanye West music in the grow room to stress them out. They might all die if i do that though...

Stressing does not appear to work well, i have seen stressed plants give lower returns on alkaloid than the same clone not stressed.

I have heard of dmso being tried before. Goodluck.

Yeah I thought so. I know for sure it wouldn't make up for the loss of alkaloids with a graft.