Bufotenine IPA Extraction

[Incunabula]

Hi

I hope my questions are advanced enough for NPD I just figured I'd get better answers here.

I've used this tek to extract bufotenine from anadenanthera colubrina, but instead of vinegar I used 80% acetic acid. While boiling it I realised my miskake, I was meant to just have used some normal kitchen vinegar which is much less concentrated.

When adding the NaCO₃ I added approxematelly 6 grams, and not 2 as I was supposed to. I did this by instinct since I was guessing my solution had become too acidic, and I new that the NaCO₃ would neutralize it, by making COONa, water and CO₂, (right?)

Other than those two deviations, I've stuck to the described procedure, and currently I see beautifull needlelike crystals forming out of the evaporating IPA on my baking dish.

I have tree questions concerning this. What I have left on my evaporation dish now (it's not completely dry yet) smells more like acetic acid than it smells like IPA by now. When I started evaporating it yesterday, it did smell a lot more like IPA. If there's still too much acetic acid in there, can it evaporate off too? And is it even possible that acetic acid can pass over through the IPA pulls?

Also, Am I right in assuming that the various steps of the tec does the following:

• Boiling in acetic acid releases the alkaloids from the seeds as they get destroyed.
• Adding NaCO₃ neutralizes the acid.
• Pulling with IPA separates the non-polar compounds from the polar compounds, leaving an extract of all polar alkaloids from the seeds.

Is this correct?

Last but not least, if I am succesfull with my experiment, is there any reason I shouldn't be able to use FASA to turn the freebase into the fumarate?

 

[Solipsis]

Not exactly sure if Na₂CO₃ behaves that differently from NaHCO₃ (bicarb), but iirc the latter is a bit more reactive to neutralize acids liberating CO₂... anyway that is a very minor thing..

The acetic acid is volatile, yes... but I'm not sure if you'd need to 'encourage' it to really get rid of it all. What I'm mostly focused on is that a lot of sodium acetate is formed and the more CO₂ is freed from sodium (bi)carbonate, the more sodium will be left bound to acetate if nothing else...

I think sodium acetate is also soluble in alcohols, so I think the more sodium (bi)carbonate you added (hopefully not an unreasonable amount to neutralize the excess acetic acid) the more you dilute your product with sodium acetate?

 

[Limpet_Chicken]

Once you get a crude isolate, then base it, take up in a nonpolar solvent, I'd avoid chlorinated solvents, as some, namely dichlor and chloroform IIRC can cause DMT to quaternize to a trimethyltryptammonium chloride, so it might well be a good idea to avoid these when working w/ bufotenin.

I'd grind the seeds, soak in dilute acid, such as citric, or dilute HCl, although DMT at least is known for being pretty intractable when it comes to forming a well-characterized hydrochloride salt. Salt it, in the ground seeds, defat with ether, or base them and use acetone (I think this should work, although always keep your solvent fractions until your thoroughly done, before disposal, that way there is no risk of accidentally tossing your baby out with your bath water, so to speak.) then if you salted the bufotenin and defatted with ether, base the result, and take it up in further portions of ether, or something like tolly or xylene should work, as should benzene.

If you based them first and tried acetone to defat, then again extract with nonpolar solvent, or you could salt the stuff again and use methanol (lower boiling point than EtOH or iPrOH, but any of these will work)

I've done an extraction on yopo seeds before and isolated the bufotenine. It seems moderately psychoactive, although its somewhat rough going. Smaller doses are better IMO. Used to quite like the snuff as traditionally made, although I substituted slaked lime for calcined snail shells of course. Kept it around as a pick-me-up, nicely perky actually, found it preferable to caffeine, especially as it doesn't interfere with my chlormethiazole.

 

[Solipsis]

Are you sure indolols are stable enough to mess around with A/B-ing? IIRC especially under basic conditions a compound like psilocin will oxidize, so you can't just do whatever you want to isolate it... I'd expect the same issue with bufotenin, otherwise sure a full-on A/B extraction would obviously yield a great product.

 

[Limpet_Chicken]

Can't speak for purity but bioassay did indicate activity.