Dear Nexians,

Once, I downed a big shot of wheatgrass while I was on about a gram of Syrian rue, and about an hour later I was experiencing subtle reality distortions that were wavy, slithery, and serpentine.

It made me think, "Hmmm, if certain grasses such as Phalaris have small amounts of DMT, why wouldn't wheat--which is a type of grass--have DMT?"

So that is the question that I pose to anyone out there interested-- Does wheatgrass have DMT, NMT, or other tryptamines in it? Do you have the wherewithall to test it? Let us know here in this thread!

Unpresumptuously,
RS

If you soak some wheatgrass in alcohol, filter and let it evaporate and then put a drop of ehrlich reagent, if it turns purple it will at least give you an indication that there are indoles/tryptamines present.

What do you think? Might be a good way to get people interested in doing more thorough tests

I often wonder if a lot of plants contain tryptamines. Has anyone ever tested common trees, like oak for example. Because many times I've sat around a fire and can smell it.

Thank you, end, that doesn't sound too hard. What's a good filter?

New at this

RhythmSpring, just a funnel and cotton plug should do fine

BundleflowerPower, again, I'd do the same as suggested above, if you find indication of tryptamines with a positive ehrlich reaction, we can try to investigate further

Hi RhythmSpring, I see that you have started an interesting research project.

Have you made repeated bioassays yet, with varying amounts of rue and wheat grass? One gram of rue sounds to me to be a low dose for effective mao inhibition. This could indicate either a very high amount of dmt present in the wheat grass, or perhaps a placebo effect.

Endlessness made a good suggestion of using ethanol for an initial extraction. If you have a mortar and pestle, you can grind the dry wheat grass material and the ethanol together. Letting the wheat grass stand overnight in ethanol also works. Doing both the grinding and standing works best. Don't try to boil the wheat grass in ethanol, that could be dangerous. You can use ordinary coffee filters to filter the extract. The filtered plant material can be ground or soaked again in ethanol to extract a bit more and the filtered extracted liquid can be combined.

In case you do not have access to fancy analytical materials and equipment, like ehrlich reagent or silica tlc plates, I suggest you consider trying paper chromatography and compare your extract with a reference solution of dmt. You can use common household bleach as a chemical stain. A description of bleach as a chromatography stain is posted here. The thread also has other interesting resources about chromatography.


That smell could also come from various indole compounds. Those are quite common in the plant kingdom. Tryptamines are also indole compounds. Not all tryptamines are psychochoactive.

Good post

Ehrlich reagent is not fancy though, it can be purchased easily, it's just a liquid you drop on the substance and the color change will be easily seen (or not seen) by anybody.

I'd also wager that for those wanting to go a bit deeper than just ehrlich, with the available TLC kits it makes things very simple even for people without any formal education in chemistry, more so than learning paper chrom, sourcing all materials and setting the whole thing up yourself. But I guess im suspect to say so considering I had something to do with designing those kits

A cursory google search turns up quite a few articles of interest to this question.

It appears that wheatgrass does contain indole alkaloids.

Looks like indole acetic acid is also present.

Evidently it's also got the N-methyltransferase.

It also seems there is some melatonin in there as well.

It looks like there is a lot of research on this front, this barely skims the surface of what is available (again upon cursory inspection). We got all the building blocks and at least one confirmed tryptamine alkaloid present. Now before you go out raiding the nearest wheat field keep in mind lots and lots and lots of plants contain these compounds IN TRACE AMOUNTS. It's also worth noting several common grasses have been tested and shown not to contain detectable amounts of tryptamines, so just because a handful of grasses got the goods, that doesn't mean all of em do.

I'll also add that ehrlich's is not very effective on crude extracts, even from the higher alkaloid DMT containing Phalaris grasses, so if you want to go that route, you'll either need to clean the extract up really well or spring for the TLC kit (which also works a lot better with cleaner extracts).

The TLC kits are excellent. You did a great work by making these fancy tools available to the amateur.

But for some people, the kits may still be expensive, especially when doing many tests, or ordering online may for some reason be difficult. Since bleach and paper are cheap commodity goods, I wanted to mention this alternative approach.

To be honest, I have no idea how practically feasible the method is. To quote the 1952 Nobel prize winner (for his groundbreaking work on chromatography) Archer Martin (source [pg.2]): "It was then I think I discovered what I might call Martin’s principle of scientific research, viz. 'Nothing is too much trouble if somebody else does it'. "

Perhaps a nice accompanying read: "The advent of paper chromatography" http://www.fasebj.org/content/9/2/287.full.pdf

Thinking "hmm, gramine is also an indole alkaloid.." I did some websearching and found this:

http://www.allaboutheaven.org/o...ions-lasting-days-005794. Curiously, it references this nexus post about hordenine...

So, RhythmSpring, it might be the case that the reported effect that you experienced from the combination of rue and wheatgrass is due to hordenine, not dmt. Still we should not be ruling out the presence of gramine either.

Oh good call! I forgot to include those in my searching.

It would appear gramine and hordenine are present as well.

This is the quote from the hordenine paper: (Which I'm attaching for verification since the hordenine bit is not in the abstract.)

Why dont you try to make a flour extraction ?

Flour =/= grass