any thoughts on using "Papain" to help break down the plant proteins of cacti in the initial steps of extractions, to help "free up" up the mesc.?



(Papain - is a proteolytic digestive enzyme derived from the papaya fruit)

"Long ago people learned that papaya latex is a very effective meat tenderizer. Tough meat was wrapped in fresh leaves for several hours to make it tender. The active tenderizing ingredient is a protein-digesting enzyme called papain, which is very similar to human stomach pepsin.

Interestingly, some of the early, crude studies of plant protein structure were made by digesting the proteins into pieces with the use of papain."




just a thought, anybody got any feed back?

interesting idea - i got many papaya trees in my garden so it would be nice if it worked - never have issues with cactus proteins tho.

yeah i was digging around in the medicine cabinet for some citric acid and i came across a bottle of papain, got me thinking. im sure you could apply it to other plant proteins, like say barks as well. but like you said phlux im not sure if its even necessary...

so how do you know it is proteins that cause the elasticity and gooeyness in the cactus?

It could be polysaccharides, like heparan sulfate or other proteoglycans that are responsible for the water retention and goo-formation. In fact, it would make more sense from a plant and evolutionary perspective for the plant to use polysaccharides to achieve water retention. It is most often animal tissues that use proteins to make water-retentive matrices from proteins (or polypeptides) like elastins and collagens. In contrast, plant tissues tend to use polysaccharides to make the same matrices, see agar derived from seaweeds.

It is still worth the try the papain but I wouldn't put my money on that.

Well Infundibulum you do make a interesting point, on further thought it might be better to use a Glucosidases or a Cellulase to break down the polysaccharides/starch chains since we are using plants....

...not sure if i have those floating around in the medicine cabinet though...

Whoa, good luck trying to find a enzyme that digests the wanted goo-forming substances!Sugars are extremely diverse in structure, both as monomers and polymers. Compared to proteins, sugars are a helluva more complicated in structure and their chemistry and thus require specific enzymes to break them down. Proteins on the other hand can be digested with a variety of proteolytic enzymes

But giving it a second thought, proteases may actually help and the experiment is worth trying. The cactus goo may use small proteins to stabilise the structure, this is quite common. Maybe lysing these proteins will get rid the gooeyness to a fair extent!

I have two words: EGG WHITES

They work for mimosa. They work for wine. They will probably work for cacti as well. They bind to proteins and other crap, and then they form precipitates and can be easily filtered out.

Give it a try. Follow the steps used for clearing soup stock.

I think heat, even boiling water, is detrimental to mescaline though. All of SWIM's tests showed this to be the case.

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Am I missing something or is Calcium Hydroxide as used in the N.T.M.E. tek not useful for this? Are its freebasing properties unwanted in this instance?

Also, my understanding is that if a plant is 'creating' some particular chemical structure, it is using the same enzyme that breaks it apart to do so. They create as well as uncreate. So, perhaps the trick is finding a way to get that enzyme out. Perhaps another species makes more of that particular enzyme. Perhaps a bacterium or even insect produces it to digest cactus tissue as food. Nature has certainly shown us stranger things. I mean come on, like the OP said, we use a fruit to dissolve cowflesh!

Are eggwhites known to contain enzymes or is there another type of reaction goin on there? Just curious.


Aside: I understand that Army Ants secrete an enzyme powerful enough to dissolve any organic tissue, including the hard shells of turtles, for instance. Nature always has a way. Its just finding it that is the tricky part. Serendipity, anyone?


Espiridion

Egg whites bind to the proteins, they don’t destroy them. They make them insoluble and easy to filter out. SWIM never tried it with cactus though, because you need to bring the solution to a boil in order to precipitate the proteins. Heat and cacti are not good together.

Egg whites is basically a protein mass (mainly albumin) that denaturates as it boils and coagulates. Upon coagulation it will also carry over other proteins that are in its surroundings.


This is only partly true, in theory enzymes catalyse one reaction as well as the reverse reaction but they do so at different rates. Usually the "forward" and "reverse" reaction have different kinetics (as well as different "activation" energies) and most often only one happens.

DNA polymerases does not degrade DNA, nucleases do. Ribosomes make proteins, they do not degrade them; proteases do. Phosphorylases phosphorylate proteins but dephosphorylases dephosphorylate them, and so on.

The other proteins stick to the egg whites and basically get trapped when it coagulates. It works REALLY WELL for soup stock and wine. I've seen soup stock go from thick and cloudy, to completely clear after using the egg white trick.

They are also used to clarify mimosa extracts, making mimosa based ayahuasca much easier on the stomach.

Give it a try. It might work way better than you expect.

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Thanks to both of you for that information. Informative and useful.


E

i think more thought should be given to beneficial enzyme actions, especially ones that alter glycosides, i wonder how an enzyme might alter say a HBWR or Acorus calamus extraction, possibly breaking up some toxic components....