after washing with water -the preip was water insoluble - mesc was a contam there it seems - idk what happened - but this seemed to be some kinda cleaning step.

I got a bit confused: Phlux in your last experiment you describe where the precipitate was dried, was it the one in the shot where you had dissolved the mescaline or was it from the cactus tea?

For the cactus tea i would suggest if possible complete or near complete evaporation.Thats the thing sometimes with acetone, its in our best interest to be anhydrous since the water portion can hold considerable alkaloidal fraction.

Something else to keep in mind : I hear acetone will not dissolve salts (such as NaCl, i wonder about others, i wonder if this pertains only to salts of metals,or inorganic salts) so precipitation seen could be other salts present in plants.They wouldnt be bitter though, would they?

I tried performing this tek on some rue extract. Initially, nothing precipitated out, but I stuck it on the fridge and within ten minutes, the solution became cloudy. I'm filtering the harmine and harmaline out now, and it looks significantly more pure than the double mansked extract it started out as. I suspect that I used too much water, but I think with some experimentation, this tek could really simplify harmala extractions.

i noticed the precip is so pure - if it is indeed the actives

What ever came of this technique phlux? Does it work for Rue?

This looks interesting. Any chance we could get a step by step instruction manual, keeping in mind that some people, like me, are retarded, and require steps from the very beginning (like how you got harmine in the first place), and some steps, which might seem obvious to you, like "washing", are not obvious to me. I don't know what washing is. That would be great. THANKS!!!!!!

I remember following this way back.

give us the ending to the story Phlux-!

I am so curious about this! It was way before my time on the nexus but i want to know!

SWIM just tried this by salting mescaline HCl out of toluene, evaporating it from 100ml to 8ml then adding 75ml of acetone. Nothing.....

He's currently evaporating the whole thing and he can already see long needles in the glass....


Can this only be done as a purification/recrystallization of mescaline HCl? Seems that precipitating it out salting water didn't work... or SWIM did something wrong.

Update: the reddish impure Mescalin HCl was dissolved in a minimal amount of water and acetone added. Worked perfectly. It was like POOF! and fluffy crystals filled the shot glass.

Question though: How do you keep the crystals solid, once filtered they collapsed and soaked into the coffee filter.

good glassware selection then carefull decanting - washing the final product white wet with acetone before filtering perhaps ?
keep the filter area small -moving the product dropwize onto the filter.

Sorry to revive an old thread. But I was interested how good this method works for purifying Harmala alkaloids.

So I started with 0.6g FB Harmalas (Harmine and Harmaline). From the looks, the same purity as in your picture, if not even a bit purer.
I put it in a beaker and added 20ml tap water.
Then I added citric acid powder until all the Harmalas have dissolved. (Needed roughly about 1g, maybe a bit less)
Now I had 20ml of yellow liquid.
Now I added 20ml of pure Acetone...and nothing happened...
Now I just have 40ml of yellow liquid.

What possibly went wrong here?

Edit:
I'm especially puzzled why in your pictures (first post) the liquid is not yellow at all???

Have you stuck it in the fridge yet?

Nah, I didn't. Will try that.
Now after more than half a day, a tiny bit of fine powder precipped out. But the liquid is still mainly yellow. And what precipped out looks completely different than the stuff in his pics.

But I still don't get why on his pics there's no yellow at all???
Even on the pic with acetic acid, where he said, it just starts to precip out, there's no yellow. Why is there no yellow??? The liquid should be strongly yellow, at least as long as the stuff didn't completely precip out yet. I really cannot understand this. Anybody an explanation?
Also why is his citrate white? Isn't harmine citrate also yellowish?

Edit:


Hmm, I needed quite a lot of citric acid to dissolve the Harmine in water. As their molecular weights are almost the same, you would need at least as much citric acid as Harmine FB to get the citrate. So a dash of lemon juice seems a bit small to me.
Could it be that he actually didn't really dissolve the Harmine but basically just washed the FB in water and acetone? Hmm, but he explicitly wrote that the Harmine dissolved...
I really have no idea what to make of all of this. Anybody an explanation?

Edit2:
Hmm...Just had another idea. Harmine FB does dissolve a little bit in plain water. Maybe he did that? Then the water wouldn't get yellow, as the harmine remains FB. But you would need quite some amount of water for your amount of FB, which from his pictures doesn't really look like that. Or does really that much harmine dissolve in plain water.
This could then make sense. By adding the acetone, the acetone binds stronger to the water than the FB and the FB would again fall out. So the white stuff he gets out would actually already be FB and not citrat. Actually there would be no citrate.
But why then adding lemon juice?

BTW: What would happen if you would just wash the FB directly with pure acetone? Would it dissolve the FB? If yes, then IMHO the water acetone ratio could be extremely critical. If you have more water, some FB would stay in the water, if you would have more acetone, the FB would stay in there.

Edit3:
Ah saw in the Wiki that FB is quite soluble in acetone with 4mg/ml. So a direct acetone wash is not recommended. Unfortunately we have no numbers about the solubility of FB in water.
Maybe just a tiny bit of citric acid makes the water dissolve much more FB, but not enough acidity to create citrates.
So then my mistake would have been, that I thought the FB must be converted to the citrate, whereas one should only add as much citric acid, that no citrates are formed yet. No idea how much citric acid this is. Anyone a guess?

Looks like some tests for solubility of harmine FB in water are in order. Harmine is lower in basicity with its fully aromatised pyridine ring.

Regarding citric acid amounts, citric acid will react with 3 equivalents of base, although the third proton only comes off at higher pH. Were you using distilled water? Citric acid's complexation capacity would have an effect on the ionic strength of tap water possibly leading to changes in the solubility of harmine FB.

Then there's the solubility curve. Sounds like a case of systematically isolating the variables. Eek! So many unknowns!

Thanks for your answer.



What exactly does that mean? Does that mean that 1 mol of citric acid can bind 3 mol of FB?

Edit:
Hmm, read the Wiki. Seems this is the case. Then I would anyways have added way too much acid, as I calculated for a 1:1 ratio. As it seems the values are: pKs1 = 3,13, pKs2 = 4,76 und pKs3 = 6,4.

Does the quite low pKs values mean, that basically already in neutral water citric acid can bind 3 FB molecules. But the more acidic the water gets the less it can bind?
And does the citric acid at basically almost pH7 already form citrates?


I did use tap water. Probably should have taken distilled. But as I used plenty of citric acid, I probably anyways would just have ended up with all the FB converted to the citrate.

Looks like you used way too much citric acid.

Reviewing what Phlux wrote, he seems to have thought the FB was recovered.

Ergo, a pinch of citric should do. Unless... lemon juice isn't exactly pure, we've got ascorbic acid and all the rest. It's about time for me to get on the case, really!

I'm not quite sure about that, because in post No 9 he wrote:


Also other people in the beginning of this thread also seemed to think he got citrates.
In the meantime I'm almost sure, that he got FB, and that the citric acid was only used to make the FB more soluble in water, but without building citrates.



Yeah, but I'm not the guy who likes such unnumbered values. As you can also hardly size them up or down accordingly when you have more or less FB to purify.
But if I did understand this principle of pKs correctly. You would only want to add as much citric acid so as not to get to the pKs3 value of 6.4. So not very acidic at all.
So if you would add acid until at say pH 6.5, it would be OK?
(I still have my problems at understanding this stuff...)

Edit:
OK calculated further. At pH 6.5 57.1% of the third proton would still be in solution. So 2.57 protons per molecule citric acid. But calculated on what is needed for that in water you would need unmeasurable tiny amounts of ug.
So even the dash of lemon juice surely goes further than that...

Edit2:
Hmm, just saw that citric acid does dissolve in acetone. This could also make another idea a possibility. Maybe with the citric acid you get the FB to dissolve in water. When you now add the acetone, the citric acid goes there and the water looses its FB solubility and the FB crashes out.
Then I would think some FB remains in the water, as it is soluble in water slightly. I would also think the amount of citric acid must be in proportion to the acetone added.

I have no proper knowledge in chemistry. Maybe someone with knowledge could chime in to explain what exactly happens in this purifying tek.
Then one could develop it into a proper tek.

any amount of citric acid added is going to donate some proton to the harmine to give the salt.

So the precipitate is either the citrate salt, or a mixture of the freebase and the salt.

Citrate buffers of some basic molecules, instead of just the salt, are sometimes prepared to increase the solubility, for example with caffeine, if you ever needed it IV, would come as a solution of caffeine, sodium citrate, and citric acid.

The purification is not a lot different from FASA, just citric acid instead of fumaric. The same concept applies, though usually with the fumarate salts they are very soluble in water so we avoid precipitating them out of water/acetone mixtures, but it will work if you add enough acetone..

And pure harmaline/harmine is white, not yellow.

So what is going on then? This idea needs to be verified for harmaline/harmine, otherwise it's nonsense.

We know it works for mesc, though.