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Good Extraction of LSA
Good Extraction of LSA
Ergine Extraction
by Mandel
seed matter.
7) You should now have between 3 to 5 liters of orange tinted ethanol. This consists mainly of
the alkaloids and resins. Most people here suggest evaporating it off, which is fine, but can leave
your possibly enclosed area with a whole lot of alcohol fumes, and so I suggest a different method.
A 500mL flask is filled with the orange solution and a condenser is set above it. Heat is added
to produce alcohol fumes, and the solvent is condensed off. Not only do you get a large portion
of your alcohol back (and probably substantially higher concentration), but you also don’t have a
large amount of fumes. You could buy a condensor somewhere for a couple hundred bucks. I got
creative and made one out of some stuff at my house.
Once the flask has dropped below one-third full, add more orange solution to fill it, mix, and then
replace condensor. This step is a little tedious, but is worth it as far as speed and efficiency. Once
you get down the the last flask full, the solution should be very cloudy, and if allowed to cool and
stongly agitated, you can force crystallisation of the alkaloids. I was considering filtering them off
here, but decided to continue on the evaporation to get them all. Once you get down the the last
third of the flask of solution, put it in a pyrex pie pan rigged on the stove top or heat source that
you have as before, and dry off the remaining solvent under a fume hood. If you only have a stove
fan, I would suggest at least rigging an additional box fan blowing out the vent as well. If you
want good separation, put the pie pan on an ever so slight tilt, you will find that things with less
molecular weight will come out of the drying solution first, and will form little veins across the top
of the pie pan. The heavier resins will come out last as a big thick brown glob at the bottom. If
you keep the pan level it will all just be together, so save yourself the nasty brown gunk.
8) When completely dry, take a clean razor and scrape the little yellow veins on the pie pan (or just
the whole brown gunk if you couldn’t get them to separate). If you are a decent chemist, you should
have a yellow crystalline solid. I got mine looking pretty good with no need for a recrystalisation
in a lighter solvent. Some friends of mine upon seeing it said that it looked sort of like really light
brown sugar. After this, an acid-base separation is possible, although there are plenty of useful
methods out there already for that and me putting one up would be redundant (not to mention
I didn’t use this additional method in this experiment, and so I wouldn’t be able to write it with
any qualitative information). The only more pure you get after that is chromatography, but if you
can afford chromatography/spectroscopy you could probably afford to hire a private chemist tutor
to teach you how to do this too. :-)
Now that you have the end product, it can be ingested (preferably by placement in a gel-cap), or it
can be saved as material for further reaction. I am doing a little research on peptide synthesis right
now, so within the next couple of months I will either have an experience report, or an experiment
regarding further synthesis using this product.