Hello All,
First off, I am not a chemist. Therefore, I'm entirely open to correction.
I'm concerned about the health and safety of those who use Xylene. Specifically, I'm concerned that people are pulling with Xylene and not taking appropriate steps to either wash with Acetone or salt out with FASA.
After Having ChemisTryptaMan review my extraction procedure, he sent the following in a PM:
ChemisTryptaMan wrote:I also forgot to mention something I saw in your own method that I wanted to warn you about, and that's xylene. Xylene is an aromatic ring with some methyl groups on it. DMT is a larger double ringed aromatic with an aliphatic tail on it with a polar end. The "aromatic" term simply means the pi electrons(the ones that make the double bonds) actually flow freely within the rings of these aromatic portions of the molecules.
For xylene this is the ring and for DMT it is the two rings. These types of molecules have a special type of interaction that is essentially a hydrophobic interaction, but it causes them to stack up. This means that even when you think you have gotten all the xylene out of your product, it still likely has quite a bit. It is these interactions that cause xylene to take so long to evap even under fan. This is also true for all solvents, but not to the same extent as xylene due to these rather strong interactions.
Now the only reason this is such a big deal is that the base pairs of a DNA strand are essentially all stacked up in this exact same way, since the nucleic acids are also aromatic(only the "steps" in the center of the chain though). Xylene, benzene, and toluene are all notorious for finding their way into the spaces between the steps, inserting itself into the stack of aromatic rings. This is known to be a primary source of mutations that lead to the big C word.
I would advice that you get your full spectrum by doing a defat and fully evapping to get the jungle that isn't soluble in naphtha. Using the heavier naphtha for this defat will make a difference in how much of the jungle you recover. I just wanted to warn you about this because it is a serious risk to work with xylene. Even breathing in the vapors from it can be deadly. It causes mutations to many of the sites in squeezes into.
So I was pretty scared about using Xylene and started asking around in chat. Both Snozzleberry and Endlessness advised that product pulled with xylene be washed with Acetone to remove traces of Xylene. They also advised that FASA works with Xylene.
Endlessness explained, Xylene can leave a thin film trapping other xylene molecules beneath it. Essentially, by washing it with Acetone, it helps evaporate nearly all of the Xylene. From what I understand, Xylene is a "heavy" hydrocarbon where Acetone is a "light" hydrocarbon. Because they are similar, like dissolves like. The Acetone dissolves the Xylene into itself and rapidly/cleanly evaporates because it is a "lighter" hydrocarbon.
Is that explanation correct?
Thank You for Reading,
Wearepeople
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