Hello,

In the forest here it grows alot of Paris quadrifolia. See the picture for an example of how it grows out here. This herb has opioid-like effects, and I therefore like to use it as a natural pain relief. It is however kinda weak, and the taste is not so good. I am therefore looking into a way to extract the goodies.

From what I have heard, it is the glucoside Paristyphnin, and it's metabolized variant Paridin, that is responsible for the effects. I do not know more about these substances than the fact that they are glucosides.

I am therefore looking for a easy way to extract glucosides from plant material. I do not at all need a tek that gives me pure Paristyphnin/Paridin, I just want to make it a bit more pure. Would perhaps a simple hot-water extraction work?

Thank you in advance.

Wish I could be of more help I went thru the came thing with this plants North American cousin I ended up just making crude plant extracts with methonal and steam distillation. Found the crude extract to be active but not strong at all even in ever increasing doses. The plants is aslo hard to find so my experements were limited due to this. I think fresh plant materal my be a huge factor with I dried mine I think this may have been a mistake.


M.V.

Glucoside are just versions of molecules that have a sugar attached to them. But you have to be careful with extracting them as they often hydrolyze apart. Sometimes glucosides have different pharmacological properties then their aglycone (molecule without sugar) and sometimes they are metabolized to their aglycone when injested.

Anyway mild extraction conditions should be used no acids or bases. Just try a methanol or ethanol extract either cold for a few days or with some heat in a shorter time. This will also concentrate a lot of other compounds though and the extract may be very sticky and gooey from all the sugars and other plant substances.

Thank you for your answers! I am aware that the fact that it is a glucoside only means that it has glucose attached, but for some reason I thought this would make it easy to extract just them and not everything else.

I believe that Paridin is the aglycone of Paristyphnin. Paridin is atleast the one that is thought to be responsible for the effects, and a mulecule with sugar attached would not be able to cross the blodd-brain-barrier, I guess? In other words, if the sugar would hydrolyze apart from the aglycone, this would propably not be bad.

I do not have access to pure or anything close to pure ethanol, methanol or any alcohol for that matter. Do you think a water extraction would work?

After som searching, at a German site I found another glucoside that is thought to be partly responsible for the effects. I think it is safe to assume that the structure of this molecule is at least related to the structure of Paristyphnin:

Pennogenin
C52H84O19
1012,9 g/mol

By the way, what is up with the upper right part of the structure? Is that some kind of a sugar? And the aglycone of Pennogenin, it does not at all look like opioids I have seen... How can it then be that they have a very distinct opioid like effects?