The eluent you used clearly works, a lot can be learned from your tests (more on that in a moment).
Nevertheless, eluents which contain too much water tend to be more "messy".. Also, lack of ammonia normally induces more of that trailing/streaking effect. If you could find some more concentrated ammonia, that would probably help a lot. Also, I find substituting ethanol for methanol works much better (so ideally 97.5ml methanol and 2.5ml 25% ammonia for 100ml eluent). Methanol has the health risks involved so make sure you dont breathe in the vapors, work in a well ventilated area. If you can't get that, then you can continue using your eluent, even though not ideal you can already see a lot.
So here's what I see in your plates:
The dark blue spots on top are harmine. This means your supposed harmaline still has a lot of harmine.
The lighter blue is harmine.. Its streaking a lot which makes it hard to see spots below it but you can see in the first pics that there are some yellowish spots just below harmaline, that is very likely a small amount of THH there.
Your third lane is way too concentrated, which makes it hard to see the spots separately. Dilute it till a third of concentration or less and try running it again, but it seems to also have a bunch of harmine, harmaline and some thh too.
Your harmine extracts still have some harmaline, as you can see the light blue spot below, though obviously they are more concentrated harmine while your supposed harmaline have more harmaline and less harmine.. But if you want them to be more pure gotta separate them better.
You can see
this thread for reference on how harmalas show up on TLC. Also you can use
this thread for reference, it has a LOT of linked info on testing different substances, how to interpret results, etc.
Lastly, as for your DMT, what is the source, if I may ask? Its interesting because you can clearly see the DMT spot (the darker one) , and a tiny NMT spot there too (the bottom one). But the more interesting part is a seemingly beta-carboline-like shine on top of the DMT. Is it possible you had some cross-contamination with the harmine samples?
Anyways thanks for sharing, feel free to ask any questions.
Be well!
der-seemann said:
I run a TLC on my Harmala extracts today.
As mobile phase I used :
40 ml Ethanol 96% and 4 ml Ammonia 9%
It didn't separate very nice. Any advice how to get a better result?
During the progress i saw some bright spots that dissapeared once i dried the plate. See Pic 1. Why?
from left to right: DHH HCl, DHH FB, crude (current extract), Harmine HCL, Harmine FB, DMT
The pics show:
UVA, still in progress, camera 1
UVC just afer drying, camera 1
UVA just afer drying, camera 1
UVC aprox 1 h after drying, camera 2
UVA aprox 1 h after drying, camera 2