Hey Nexes,
I've recently been discovering all the acacias in my local area and have taken a few snippings of branchlets and phyllodes of an A.Floribunda. I figured I'd try to confirm the presence of alkaloids with an Ehrlich test I had stashed away, but it came back negative on the phyllodes and the branchlet bark. Just wondering why this would be?

Do reagent tests just not work on these types of raw material? It certainly works on active fungi, as I tried it out just to make sure.

Is the DMT content a seasonal appearance, and therefore, it may not be present at this moment, but could be at another time of the year?

I've been advised that A.Floribunda phyllodes are quite active, and I'm quite certain that is the species I'm dealing with.

Mushrooms are mostly water, so a test might work on them. But trees are mostly trees, even a dried percentage of active alkaloids would be ~1% if it was viable.

Maybe it's just a numbers thing?

Yeah fair call

Alkaloid concentrations are reported highest during the dry season.

Reagent and even TLC testing on raw plant matter isn't very effective. I'd suggest a mini dry-tek.

Take 10 grams or so of your twigs and phylodes, dry it out and grind it up to a homogenous powder, mix with a bit of calcium hydroxide and water to make a paste, allow to dry again, crush up the paste into a powder again and pull with ethanol or acetone or IPA. Evap the chosen solvent and this will yield you a crude freebase alkaloid extract that should provide better results with your reagent.

Dragendorff's is the typical spot test reagent for alkaloids. Use it on a small acid extract of the material. This will then indicate whether it's worth proceeding towards a solid extract.


This might yield you a crude freebase alkaloid extract...

Ehrlich's is specific for indoles, so it seems that would be spot test of choice rather than Dragendorf's wouldn't it? Some of the other tests like Mecke and Mandellin are even more specific for DMT, but I find the color change difficult to interpret sometimes.

Thanks team, that's all going to be a big help. I really didn't want to go to the lengths of doing a full extract, especially being my first attempt, which I'm bound to mess up on something that may not contain the goods. I'll attempt this mini dry tek (thanks dreamer042) and then retest.

Can anyone confirm whether I could harvest dried leaves and bark fallen from the tree? Or does it have to be fresh material? And how long can it then be stored for and remain viable?

Just an FYI for future searches: After blending my A.Floribunda phyllodes to something between a fine powder and finely chopped, I decided to give the Ehrlich reagent test another go (why not?). I made sure I got a bit of phyllode dust in there, and put a few reagent drops in and left it overnight. This morning I checked it not expecting much, but the liquid is PURPLE! Indicating a positive for tryptamine alkaloids. So maybe it really needed to penetrate the fibres of the phyllode in order to cause a reaction.

Thanks for sharing

What colour would chlorophyll give with Ehrlich's? Chlorophyll contains pyrrole subunits, a bit like indole.

Beware of false positives!

downwardsfromzero, my knowledge is pretty scarce, so thanks for the heads up. I'm planning on doing an extract at some stage so that will obviously confirm (or not) whether this stuff is any good or not.