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Substance testing Light bluish-green spots in Mecke for a moment (ketamine)

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blig-blug

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I'm reagent testing a ketamine sample with reagents from ProTestKit (so, in "solid" form for these reagents except for Morris). Everything looks as it should:
  • Mecke: No change (but read later)
  • Froehde: No change
  • Liebermann: Light yellow
  • Morris: Violet with a bluish hue
However, with Mecke, small clear bluish green spots appear for a moment, lasting for less than ten seconds. They don't reappear and there are no further changes. Seeing that clear bluish green can indicate opioids, I tested with Marquis and got no reaction, indicating no opioids.

What could this be? Is it possible that due to the solid form of the reagent (I think it's soaked in some kind of crystal) the first spots that touch the ketamine have too much ketamine for some seconds and so turn that color?
 
Update: I did a TCL test. It shows a single spot, not even a single fainter spot. The spot is longer than expected according to the kit booklet, but I accidentally left it for too long, the plate had fully soaked for some minutes.
 
I don't know about the colour change, but you could try re-x of your material and/or testing of either the remaining supernatant or a brief washing of the crystals (for surface contamination).

Did it seem as though it was just a few small specks within the powder that reacted? If so, those should dissolve more rapidly than the bulk of the material. This may allow you to concentrate the putative contaminant.

Maybe someone with more experience of reagent testing ketamine could chime in, though.
blig-blug said:
Update: I did a TCL test. It shows a single spot, not even a single fainter spot. The spot is longer than expected according to the kit booklet, but I accidentally left it for too long, the plate had fully soaked for some minutes.
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I'd suggest trying again with a lower amount of sample as well. You can't necessarily guarantee that a contaminant would have a significant separation.
 
Transform said:
try re-x of your material and/or testing of either the remaining supernatant or a brief washing of the crystals
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It's a good idea. I'm not sure I have access to a proper solvent here (only ethyl acetate so far), but I'll look up possibilities.

Transform said:
Did it seem as though it was just a few small specks within the powder that reacted?
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It's hard to say, because due to the solid form of the reagent, it seems that the color change tends to appear earlier in the reagent grains that touch the powder first, and it takes a little of stirring to make it homogeneous. It only appears in a few areas and it's very little, so it could be that.

Transform said:
I'd suggest trying again with a lower amount of sample as well. You can't necessarily guarantee that a contaminant would have a significant separation.
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Will do!

What surprises me is that the color disappears later. Usually they change to darker colors, but maybe it's due to the hypothetical contaminant being present only in a few specks, as you suggest, and it later disseminates.
 
Transform said:
Hm, yeah. I forgot that Mecke can be 'gritty'. tbh, I thought my reagent was getting old when I saw this. Perhaps a really vigorous shake of the bottle would clear this up before further use.
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In this case, it's because it's not the normal reagent preparation, but a crystalline version that was needed to comply with new laws banning the sale of "explosive precursors" (just in case that was not what you had in mind): https://protestkit.eu/how-to-use-crystalline-reagents/
 
blig-blug said:
In this case, it's because it's not the normal reagent preparation, but a crystalline version that was needed to comply with new laws banning the sale of "explosive precursors" (just in case that was not what you had in mind): https://protestkit.eu/how-to-use-crystalline-reagents/
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Sorry to hear that…
yeah, f those legislator guys 🤦‍♂️
As if anyone could make a bomb using 5mL of test reagent 🤡

No wonder you're seeing anomalous results; the entire gamut of test results will need redoing on account of this pointless bs 😠
 
Transform said:
No wonder you're seeing anomalous results; the entire gamut of test results will need redoing on account of this pointless bs 😠
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It says that it contains the same substances (soaked in some kind of crystal) and should react the same, but yeah, it probably won't behave completely the same.

What most puzzles me is that Marquis didn't show anything. I would expect that if this is happening due to small amounts of opioids, it should show in Marquis too. Even if also only temporarily. And as far as I've been able to find, opioids are the only (common?) substances that cause Mecke to turn green.

If @endlessness connects, have you encountered this kind of phenomenon of Mecke turning green at certain spots for a very short time?
 
But in that case, wouldn't it also show up in Marquis, even if only at certain spots? Unless the hypothetical contaminant is not an opioid. I've read on Wikipedia that PMA and PMMA can show olive green, but they should show up in Marquis as well.

I did Mecke twice, scooping out the powder from the bag every time (so not from a single scooping-out), so they are unlikely to come from an adjacent area of the bag.
 
As a funny anecdote: I tried asking an LLM to see if it maybe could bring up some different possibility, and I got this:

Claude said:
Based on my research, I've found some interesting insights about your observation. Someone else reported the exact same phenomenon - light bluish-green spots appearing briefly with Mecke reagent on a ketamine sample, lasting less than ten seconds before disappearing, with Marquis showing no reaction.

Possible Explanations
Here are the most likely reasons for this transient color change:
1. Testing methodology with solid/crystal reagents
The brief nature of the color change forum
Click to expand...

(proceeds to repeat the main possibilities pointed out in this thread, linking to it)
 
If it doesn't go insane, we should look into getting one. "Nexus" is basically synonymous with what an AI archive would offer. It would be worth it just to ask it what it thinks, after having read everything about DMT.
 
Update: I ran Mecke again, but this time with a drop of ketamine dissolved at 80mg/mL. No reaction whatsoever. So it looks like it may have been related to the crystalline reagent touching directly the powder and getting a very high concentration at certain spots.

I also ran TLC again, this time being more careful to get it dissolved in the proportion recommended by the manufacturer, being more successful in properly handling the little glass tube, and not waiting for too long. Again, there was a single spot, this time it was only slightly bigger than the reference size for ketamine listed on the kit (and they say there is a 15% variation).
 
Icon said:
If it doesn't go insane, we should look into getting one. "Nexus" is basically synonymous with what an AI archive would offer. It would be worth it just to ask it what it thinks, after having read everything about DMT.
Click to expand...
It could be interesting to see the predominant opinions in the Nexus corpus. Run the same question 100 times and see what percentage of times it gives one or another answer

This would actually not be that difficult to do, it can be done by using an open model and fine-tuning it on the Nexus dataset. The only thing is one would need to rent GPU compute for that, probably.
 
I did reagent testing and TLC on a different batch. In this batch those bluish green spots didn't appear at all.

Reagent results:
  • Mecke: No change
  • Froehde: No change
  • Liebermann: Light yellow
  • Morris: Blue-violet
The TLC results are really puzzling me, though. Either I did something very wrong before, or this time, or both substances can't be ketamine.

This time the spot is perfectly round (they were elongated when I was doing the other batch), and of a similar size but much lower, about 50% the height. The only possibility that comes to mind (other than at least one of those not being ketamine) is that I wasn't being careful enough to look at when the plate was fully soaked, waiting 25 minutes instead. That could explain also why it was elongated and now it's not.

I'm going to do a test with caffeine and compare spot height, from what I see it should be more or less the same height.
 
The caffeine spot height is consistent with the last sample analyzed being ketamine, it's just about 0.5cm higher. I think the most likely explanation is that I left the plate soaking for too long for the runs of the previous batch. I don't think there is any substance (at least that one can reasonably expect to find) that looks like ketamine, reacts like ketamine to the reagents I used, has effects consistent with ketamine, but has about double the TLC spot height.
 
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