hummus
Rising Star
Just been spending a bit of time looking around at column chromatography and it really doesn't look as scary or difficult as it's put out to be..
Trying to figure out roughly how big an apparatus would be needed to separate gram-quantities of mixed alkaloids, thinking a 500mm*50mm column would suffice as a rough estimate?
Lab-grade silica gel seems easy enough to source too but does it have to be such a fine grade? If so a diy could be ball-milling dessicant silica and washing it well with solvent first?
So then it's just separating out your compounds.
In lots of luck if you can see your compounds but being colourless alkaloids we're after seems you have to be more clever
For an easy mix of compounds that you know to be safe (enough) via bioassay then it could be as simple as either taking a ridiculous amount of fractions and evaporating and seeing what you get or continuously taking a drop or two on a pane of glass and switching receptacles when there's a gap between residue being shown.
A quick search shows this could be a good option, pretty much exactly what I was thinking of and seems to do the job.
Seems he had quite some issues with rf interference but with a darkened shielded case mounted to the bottom of the column and making a shielded usb cable should allow you to visualise on-the-go what's coming out of the bottom of your gravity fed column.
If done first with a small sample column and then repeated you could easily compare against the first spectra and start collecting when you see the required peaks..
Then it's onto actual analysis, which will be difficult to do against published spectra with diy equipment but if you can figure out a way to make some relatively well known standards (ie chromatograph some re-xed mhrb extract and guess the largest peak is dmt ;P) then shouldn't be at all difficult for separation of usable quantities..
Trying to figure out roughly how big an apparatus would be needed to separate gram-quantities of mixed alkaloids, thinking a 500mm*50mm column would suffice as a rough estimate?
Lab-grade silica gel seems easy enough to source too but does it have to be such a fine grade? If so a diy could be ball-milling dessicant silica and washing it well with solvent first?
So then it's just separating out your compounds.
In lots of luck if you can see your compounds but being colourless alkaloids we're after seems you have to be more clever
For an easy mix of compounds that you know to be safe (enough) via bioassay then it could be as simple as either taking a ridiculous amount of fractions and evaporating and seeing what you get or continuously taking a drop or two on a pane of glass and switching receptacles when there's a gap between residue being shown.
A quick search shows this could be a good option, pretty much exactly what I was thinking of and seems to do the job.
Seems he had quite some issues with rf interference but with a darkened shielded case mounted to the bottom of the column and making a shielded usb cable should allow you to visualise on-the-go what's coming out of the bottom of your gravity fed column.
If done first with a small sample column and then repeated you could easily compare against the first spectra and start collecting when you see the required peaks..
Then it's onto actual analysis, which will be difficult to do against published spectra with diy equipment but if you can figure out a way to make some relatively well known standards (ie chromatograph some re-xed mhrb extract and guess the largest peak is dmt ;P) then shouldn't be at all difficult for separation of usable quantities..