Odd Ehrlich reagent coloring from melatonin.
Not sure if here or Biochemistry is the place to post this so I'll just put it on Organic Chemistry for now. I recently decided to extract melatonin
from OTC pills via acetone, which went all well and good. I had two products, one being some orangeish crystals which I assumed to be a bit of impure
artificial strawberrying flavoring (from the color) and another some white powdery stuff. I got a small sample of both and tested them with the
ehrlich reagent to see how readily each would react (ehrlich reagent used to identify tryptamines and what have you and melatonin being
5-Methoxytryptamine with a secondary amide substituted for the primary amine). The white powdery stuff reacted as the color scheme should show for
melatonin, although not as readily as I'd think. But the orangey crystals reacted really readily and not normally. They reacted normally for ~10
minutes and then turned green. The only other tryptamine I've found that turns green with the ehrlich is 5-MeO-DMT, which I don't and don't plan on
having. So I'm a bit stumpted here, I redid it and had the same result as well. As far as I'm aware the strawberry flavor is Ethyl
methylphenylglycidate, which doesn't have any indoles so I don't see where that color could come from. Perhaps the orangey color dissolving and mixing
with the blue from the regular reaction?
Any thoughts?
(Also the green might be kind of hard to see in the pictures but it's really prominent in real life, can't see anything else. Also sorry if there's
any spelling or grammer mistakes, posting from my phone)
     
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