kazaa81 - 25-7-2004 at 06:07
Hallo to all,
I am interesting in any process for extraction of timole, the Thymus volgaris most common alkaloid.
Thanx for help. 
unionised - 25-7-2004 at 14:37
Do you mean thymol (isopropyl methyl phenol) which isn't an alkaloid but is present in thymus vulgaris ?
Hang-Man - 25-7-2004 at 15:12
Thymol can be made my using iron chloride to oxidize piperitone, which is used as a flavoring agent, or it can be extracted from eucalyptus oil
Thymus Vulgaris under alcohol...
kazaa81 - 16-8-2004 at 14:17
Hallo to all,
I've tried to dissolve the thymol in some pieces of Thymus volgaris grass by placing them under ethyl alchol, because I've read that thymol
is soluble in alcohol but much less in water.
Now, after some days, I think that the actives principes of the grass are extracted.........if I filter out the useless parts of the grass and put the
liquid in water, can thymol precipitate?
I wait confirm for this.
Thanx for help 
Geomancer - 17-8-2004 at 13:32
It might; then again, it might not. You might get better results if you used a continuous extraction--run the solvent through repeatedly. If thymol
drops out, you can probably expect other stuff to as well. As you probably already know, the canonical method is steam distillation. If you can't
manage that, and the extraction/precipitation isn't good enough, consider the following.
Many phenols in plants are bound as glycosides, if thymol is one of them you may want to start by processing the plant with a weak acid (you
probably want to defat first, by basifying the plant and extracting the fatty stuff). Extract the acid mixture with your favorite nonpolar solvent,
then extract the nonpolar solution with aqueous base. Acidify to precipitate the products. Fine-tuning the procedure may give you better selectivity,
but you will still get a mixture of phenols. Recystalization may be possible, if you're very lucky. Otherwise you're stuck with distallation
or chromatography. Overall, the procedure would be very similar to that of alkaloid extraction.