Boba155 - 5-9-2011 at 19:15
Buying plants from overseas to extract, do I need to have them frozen? Or is this simply a precaution.
Bot0nist - 5-9-2011 at 20:22
Depends on what your trying to extract and its stability. Also, freezing some plant matter help with extraction as the ice crystals that form inside
the plants cells breaks open the rigid cell walls. Can you be more specific?
Endimion17 - 6-9-2011 at 03:30
Traditionally, plants are dried, and most of the stuff people were extracting from them isn't harmed in that way.
Drying is cheaper than keeping them frozen, but for some applications they can be kept on dry ice. I presume it's for isolating/detecting very small
amounts of very complex molecules like proteins. It's not really used for actual extractions of useable amounts.
Of course once they're freezed the cells are destroyed, and if the ice is thawed bacterial decomposition takes place at a really quick rate.
Freeze drying is a nice method...
Cason - 6-9-2011 at 15:47
@Endimion: " I presume it's for isolating/detecting very small amounts of very complex molecules like proteins. It's not really used for actual
extractions of useable amounts...."
Not necessarily- One might be extracting the phenolic cmpds from berry plants or the terpenes from a sunflower species and the quantities could be
significant. Opium is a gum that oozes out of poppies and contains some 23 alkaloids in quite usable amounts ;^)