THH and harmine isolation

[downwardsfromzero]

If you succeed with separating a reasonably clean harmine fraction, could you perhaps see if anything happens with a magnesium reduction on it? Reaction size can be half a gram of harmine or even less.

Great thinking! Sould have thought of that myself. So we might see if someting happens with it in a magnesium reduction.
I can also get more harmine by doing a extraction from dark roasted rue. But I don't know how pure harmine that is.

Harmine wouldn't accept the donor hydrogen like harmaline. It wouldn't do anything, that ring is locked down. But, with that said, you should be able to reduce the harmaline in an unseparated mixture of harmine/harmaline to THH and not effect the harmine at all. THH and harmine are even easier to separate than harmine and harmaline because of an even greater difference in the pH they crash out at.

I think that may have been a typo - or a brain fart; as far as dissolving metals reducing harmine goes it requires something like sodium in amyl alcohol.

But my train of thought was possibly along the lines that magnesium can be used to produce metallic sodium so it may have sufficient of a reduction potential to reduce harmine under the right circumstances. Hard to remember exactly what I may have been thinking a year ago.

 

[downwardsfromzero]

A quick look back, it was in order to answer this question:

A chemist might argue, the cleaner the harmaline the better. Something we still need to test, though, is if harmine reacts with dissolving magnesium at all. There certainly seemed to be rather a small amount of harmine precipitate after my rue tea reduction but that's very likely to be down to poor recovery levels.

On the basis of the electrode potential of magnesium compared with that of sodium, it is not a foregone conclusion to assume that harmine will not react with magnesium.