the paper listed above shows significant differences in yield, 5 different solvents & 5 different yields. what are your thoughts on this ??
Can you quote or screenshot what you're talking about? If you mean Table 2, that's solubility in five different solvents, not yield.
Oh actually I guess it's not solubility, that is a table of yields. But they only did one pull, not an exhaustive extraction. What they yielded in one pull reflects solubility relative to each other. Basically, DCM has a higher DMT solubility than n-Hexane, so their one pull experiment yielded a lot more with DCM.
"The fact that n-hexane has the lowest polarity of all
organic solvents contributed to avoid the formation of
emulsions when combined with aqueous phase and thus it
was the highest volume of solvent separated in the final step
of the extraction. On the other hand, its low polarity
certainly accounts for the lowest DMT concentration found,
as the DMT molecule possesses an amine group that conveys
polarity to it.
Studies have shown that the solvent dichloromethane
reacts with DMT to produce N-chloromethyl–N,Ndimethyltryptamine
chloride (Brendt et al., 2008; Dunlap
& Olson, 2018). The biphasic state where dichloromethane
and aqueous solution were in contact extended over a week.
Considering these results, it is highly possible that some
amount of DMT may have been lost to the aqueous phase
during extraction, since the resultant reaction compound
described has ionic nature. Taking this into account, it is
surprising to see that dichloromethane was the solvent with
highest DMT concentration. As our samples for
analysis were dried and stored at −20 °C, we assume that
this reaction did not take place after the extraction procedure
ended."
The study left a lot of questions unanswered, since they couldn't measure the purity of the DMT or what else the solvents may have extracted. I'm a little confused myself, but I'm still pretty amateur at reading science papers.