Sciencemadness Discussion Board

Possible routes of Muscimol purification?

Hockeydemon - 20-11-2013 at 20:50

I was on my way back to my car from class and I noticed an Amanita Pantherina growing in the parking lot. I came back with some paperbags, and ended up finding about 30lbs pantherina, gemmata, and muscaria.

I took these, chopped them up, and soaked them in hot water for a few hours. Then evaporated the water off using heat in order to also decarboxylate the ibotenic acid to muscimol. Now I have a gooey resin.

What can I do to further purify it? I would love to get it to crystal form, but I doubt I am able to because of how hard J. Ott's Pharmacotheon's isolation was.

Would there be any benefit to performing an A/B extraction with acetic acid? Here is something similar

Useful info: Muscimol is an extremely polar compound with a XLogP3 of -1.4. Muscimol is very soluble in water and methanol, slightly soluble in ethanol, DMSO and DMF. It has a pKa of 4.8

Any suggestions would be welcome.

[Edited on 21-11-2013 by Hockeydemon]

bfesser - 20-11-2013 at 20:53

Flat out asking how to purify sedative-hypnotics with no stated experimental or scientific intent? This isn't the place for this. [closed]

[edit] Re-opened&mdash;<em>for now</em>&mdash;due to OP edit.

[Edited on 21.11.13 by bfesser]

Hockeydemon - 20-11-2013 at 21:11

It should be noted Muscimol, and ibonetic acid are not illicit substances. I don't feel like if I had asked how to purify paint thinner using the same question structure any fuss would be given even though people technically can get high off it.

Anyways.. If I added acetic acid would the muscimol become muscimol acetate that I could then use a non-polar solvent to extract it with?

Hockeydemon - 21-11-2013 at 00:01

Quote:
A novel constituent of amanita muscaria


isolation of 3-hydroxyisoxazole from natural sources.

fresh plants were added to boiling water, cooled rapidly,
filtered and the filtrates treated with Deacidite FF (base)
resin. The resin was washed with water and the
compound eluted by means of acetic acid.The eluate was
freeze-dried, disolved in water and passed down a
column of celulose phosphate (whatman P70). the
substance gave a pale yellow band which was elated with
N NH4OH and the eluate freeze dried . The
semi-purified material was crystallized from alcohol to
give the compound, mp. 172-174 (decomp)


I found this, but I have no idea what De-acidite FF is. I google it, and it comes up in plenty of publications on things like water purification. But it only returns primary literature, nothing on what is actually is..

Ascaridole - 21-11-2013 at 01:05

Look up Dowex HCR-S/S FF resin, its an ion exchange resin. Not cheap but its how they purify proteins and other bio-molecules.

Hockeydemon - 21-11-2013 at 02:45

Haha if I have to request a quote to find out the cost of it then it's out of my price range. But I'm glad I know what it is now - thank you.

Ideally I would like to substitute purity for cheap where I can. If I have to make chloroform or something I can live with that, but I'd rather not spend much money outside of my current chemical/apparatus supply.

bfesser - 21-11-2013 at 05:51

Quote: Originally posted by Hockeydemon  
It should be noted Muscimol, and ibonetic acid are not illicit substances.
Regardless, your post before you edited it was unacceptable and bordering on 'cookery'. The isolation in the paper you linked looks fairly straightforward to me. Try substituting a comparable <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sulfonic_acid" target="_blank">sulfonic</a> <img src="../scipics/_wiki.png" /> cation exchange resin; many are available.

<a href="http://www.dow.com/scripts/litorder.asp?filepath=liquidseps/pdfs/noreg/177-02385.pdf" target="_blank">DOWEX&trade; HCR-S/S FF Cation Exchange Resin</a> <img src="../scipics/_pdf.png" />

Hockeydemon - 22-11-2013 at 07:22

It appears that Brita water filters use a cation exchange resin along with activated charcoal. Do you think this would work? As I happen to have those at my house right now.

bfesser - 23-11-2013 at 16:24

Those filters often contain what's termed mixed-bed <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ion-exchange_resin" target="_blank">ion exchange resin</a> <img src="../scipics/_wiki.png" />, meaning that it's a mix of both cationic and anionic resin beads.

[edit: "often"]

[Edited on 24.11.13 by bfesser]

Nicodem - 24-11-2013 at 01:30

Judging solely on the name and calling it a base in the parenthesis, "Deacidite FF (base)" is probably a quat hydroxide on a polymer support (it is not commercially available under such name any more, but many other analogous resins are). As such it will retain any acid, or amino acid, including muscimol. Since muscimol is an acid and a base, it should be retained by either cation or anion exchange resins. However, unless the resin is itself an acid or a base (as Deacidite apparently is), the pH should be corrected in accordance to the resin ion exchange properties.

For better efficiency in any chosen purification, you could first deplete the protein, saccharine and polysaccharide fractions by dissolving in methanol, centrifuging, decanting from crap and rotavaping. Most proteins precipitate in methanol. However, without a centrifuge it is very difficult to remove them as the mass is often unfilterable.

Hockeydemon - 21-10-2015 at 19:18

Its that time of year again so I figured I'd pick this thread up where I left off.

Quote: Originally posted by Nicodem  

For better efficiency in any chosen purification, you could first deplete the protein, saccharine and polysaccharide fractions by dissolving in methanol, centrifuging, decanting from crap and rotavaping. Most proteins precipitate in methanol. However, without a centrifuge it is very difficult to remove them as the mass is often unfilterable.


Unfortunately I don't own a centrifuge - I did attempt to make one quickly out of some air tools, but it wasn't ideal & weight balancing was a problem.

I do have some questions that hopefully someone could make an educated guess on...

If dried Amanita Muscaria is refluxed in ~80% methanol for 30 minutes and filtered off the filtrate is an orange liquid clouded by protein suspension as Nicodem indicated. If this extract is made dry then the resulting product is similar to an oleoresin - it actually looks & feels BHO. I can pick it up, and handle it.

100ml of said liquid is mixed with DCM, emulsified, allowed to partition into two layers, and separated.. The separated aqueous layer no longer has a suspension of proteins and is a completely transparent orange liquid. When the DCM is removed from the separated organic layer there is a small layer of water containing all of the protein, and some insoluble oil droplets. If this extract is made dry then it is the same orange/yellow, but with no structure... It is a viscous oil.

There is very little literature that I can find on the solubility of muscimol outside of what was listed earlier in the thread so I don't know to what extent muscimol was soluble in the DCM.

This publication on protein behavior in water/methylene chloride interfaces, and some other ones indicate that DCM/water emulsion denatures the proteins to an extent. Could this have anything to do with the aqueous layer no longer having a visible suspension of proteins?

If the original extract is treated with a couple drops of glacial acetic acid a second layer forms. Initially I thought it could be methyl acetate, but doesn't the reaction between acetic acid + methanol require H2SO4 to catalyze the reaction? This is probably hard to speculate on because the original extract contains multiple compounds... Just curious either way.




[Edited on 22-10-2015 by Hockeydemon]