Vitamin P

[Loveall]

This is what I call Vitamin P (see attachment below). It is a loose sparkly red powder composed of vitamin C, psilocin ascorbate, mushroom sugars that are not soluble in acetone (such as mannitol if present), and possibly other mushroom material.

I bioassayed 500mg of the powder by dissolving it in water (equivalent to 1.5g of dry mushroom) 18 days after preparing it, and it was active. Come on was quick. Can't tell what the % yield was, but it seemed reasonable based on the subjective bioassay.

Procedure

- 6g of pre-sporulating dried P. Cubensis fruits we're ground and placed in a mason jar.
- 500ml of acidic water (1g of vitamin C) we're added to the jar (pH ~ 4).
- After an hour rest, jar contents we're brought up to 70C in a hot water bath and allowed to cool (done 2x). In this step, psilocybin should be converted to psilocin (at this point we have been following this, except that Vitamin C is being used over vinegar to prevent oxidation.)
- Acid soup was filtered until only very slight cloudiness remained and it easily passed trough a triple stack of coffee filters.
- Acid was dried in a shallow pan in the oven at lowest setting.
- Resulting hard waxy film should contain psilocin ascorbate along with excess Vitamin C and other fungal material soluble in acidic water.
- Waxy material was washed with dry acetone twice (acetone washes are also used here) making sure all waxy flakes dissolve into the acetone and recovering the settlement with a coffee filter between washes.
- Dry weight of final material is 2g. 1g of this is mushroom material and 1g is vitamin C. The rest should be psilocin ascorbate (~100mg) which is (hopefully) a stable salt to oxidation when stored dry with Vitamin C

Vitamin P:

 

[blue.magic]

This is very interesting and inspiring. I still wait for my shrooms to experiment with but I will definitely try this.

Two concerns here:

1. Are you sure the drying process does not destroy the psilocin? I think the conventional drying methods (which use heat and air) can destroy virtually all of it by oxidation and heat also speeds up enzymatic process that degrades psilocin.

2. Are you sure psilocin ascorbate exists? There are some rumors (1 2) that psilocybin can form hydrochloride salt but I never heard of any other salts. Both psilocin and psilocybin are amphoteric (so A/B extraction is of no use here) and I am aftraid dry psilocin will degrade quickly when exposed to air.

Here is one interesting article I found on alcoholic extraction:

Kysilka, Roman, and Milan Wurst. "A novel extraction procedure for psilocybin and psilocin determination in mushroom samples." Planta medica 56.3 (1990): 327-328.

Here they significantly improved psilocin extraction by using 25% ethanol. They used 75% methanol to extract psilocybin. They found the optimal alcohol concentration empirically.

Here is a simple tutorial on trufflemagic.com. This procedure is applied on 200-proof ethanol extract:

1. Add a few drops of hydrochloric acid to achieve pH 3.0.
2. Evaporate down to 1/10 of the original volume.
3. Add a nonpolar solvent such as cigarette lighter or paint thinner and mix slowly.
4. Let it stand for a couple of hours.
5. The solvent will float on top of the extract and can be removed by syringe or by freezing the water and pouring off the solvent.
6. Remove the rest by slowly adding acetone to the extract. Let it stand.
7. Two layers will eventually form. On the bottom is a dark layer while a yellowish to greenish layer will appear on top. Remove the top layer by syringe.
8. Add new acetone. Mix slowly and remove the acetone once more.
9. Collect all the dark, sticky residue and let it dry. Large transparent crystals will start to form. The slower the evaporation, the bigger the crystals.
10. Weigh the crystals to determine their potency.

So maybe you can further improve your extraction by adding some ethanol (something like 1 part vodka and 1 part water will do) and then continue with acetone.

I am still afraid they crystallize sugars in the above tutorial - I don't have a microscope yet but it should be possible to distinguish psilocybin needle-like crystals from sugars. I also plan to use chloroform and benzene that should remove more of the unwanted stuff (e.g. urea). I am not sure about the mannitol solubility in various solvents - we could rule it out too using correct solvent.

Unfortunately, getting both psilocin and psilocybin requires two extraction paths as e.g. naphtha or hexane will dissolve psilocin along with unwanted stuff.

Overall, I am more interested in psilocybin rather than psilocin. One researcher told me they favor psilocybin over psilocin for its water solubility (crucial for oral administration) and shelf stability.

Anyway, I love the "vitamin" nomenclature, adding vitamin P to the list:

vitamin L = LSD
vitamin M = Mescaline
vitamin X = MDMA or "eXtasy"



Attaching some interesting figures from the 1990 article from Kysilka and a monograph on psilocin/psilocybin.

 

[blue.magic]

forgot to attach the images...

 

[Forestwalker]

I'm very interested in this topic, I'm going to do some homework on it and hopefully contribute some. ,if it doesn't oxidize then great job and I'm very excited ! :thumb_up:

 

[Loveall]

This is very interesting and inspiring. I still wait for my shrooms to experiment with but I will definitely try this.

Two concerns here:

1. Are you sure the drying process does not destroy the psilocin? I think the conventional drying methods (which use heat and air) can destroy virtually all of it by oxidation and heat also speeds up enzymatic process that degrades psilocin.

2. Are you sure psilocin ascorbate exists? There are some rumors (1 2) that psilocybin can form hydrochloride salt but I never heard of any other salts. Both psilocin and psilocybin are amphoteric (so A/B extraction is of no use here) and I am aftraid dry psilocin will degrade quickly when exposed to air.

1) I'm think there is little to no oxidation. This is because when the procedure is done with vinegar I got blue colors, indicating oxidation. With vitamin C this did not happen. Also, the bioassay 18 days after drying went well. Vitamin C effects can be dramatic, I added it to an oxidized vinegar extract and the dark blue went away (see before/after attachments). Not sure if vitamin C recovers psilocin completely or of it is just reducing the =O quinone bonds to something else that is not blue but is not psilocin either.

2) I'm not sure. However, when drying in an acid environment psilocin will be positively charged and want to form a salt with something. The negative ascorbate ions are there, so I'm assuming/proposing what the salt would form. I can say that it surely dissolves very easily and is active. Critical review and feedback are very welcome as always.

 

[downwardsfromzero]

From your picture, it looks as though our vitamin C comes with added rose hips. Does this go towards explaining the red colour of the extract? Are you unable to find pure, unadulterated ascorbic acid? They sell it in the supermarket where I live.

 

[Loveall]

From your picture, it looks as though our vitamin C comes with added rose hips. Does this go towards explaining the red colour of the extract? Are you unable to find pure, unadulterated ascorbic acid? They sell it in the supermarket where I live.

Good observation. I could not find pure vitamin C at the store. Rose hips are a small amount. I don't think that explains the tan color as out of the bottle and into water the vitamin C with added rose hips is perfectly clear.

 

[downwardsfromzero]

Sounds like maybe they were lying about the rose hips :lol:

Thanks for posting this method, it's certainly worth trying out should the opportunity arise. :thumb_up:

 

[endlessness]

Thanks for sharing, sounds great if ascorbic acid indeed prevents that oxidation completely.

Lets get it tested!

 

[Loveall]

Thanks guys.

Endlessness, yes testing would be great. I wanted to get some repeats done and send a couple samples out at the same time with the same process and with different birthdates to check for degradation. Will take a few months to get that kind of sample ready. By the way, this thread was an invaluable reference (along with the wiki), many thanks for that post.

 

[Loveall]

Something interesting happens when acetone is added to concentrated tea. Motivation for trying this is because the gunk after the standard dry in post #1 dissolves slowly (and some of it not at all) in dry acetone making cleanup difficult for larger batches.

Below are a couple pictures, first one has 100ml of tea concentrate made with 30g of dry mushrooms and 5g of Vitamin C on the right (tea is dark Amber and transparent), and clear acetone on the left. The concentrated tea smells like an cold mushroom urinal. In the second picture the acetone is added. Gunk falls out and solution becomes cloudy. The gunk that immediately falls out has the consistency of snot (mushroom snot, hehe) and has the strong urinal smell. There is more gunk that falls out later and that has a lighter color. Plan is to let the cloudy solution settle in the freezer, decant, and then dry. Ideally the dried material is a lot easier to clean up after crashing out gunk in the acetone cosolvent and is still active. This assumes the active psilocin ascorbate remains dissolved in the acetone/water during this extra cleanup step.

 

[Loveall]

The acetone co-solvent precipitation to remove the mushroom snot is looking very good. Upon evaporation a thin layer was left behind and upon scraping it, crystals popped up for the most part. There is still some gunk but it is minimal compared to not doing the acetone co-solvent precipitation before evaporation.

Still need bioassay, yield, and analytical results. Until then we may have nothing, but color me excited at this point :d

While it lasts in the chat, here is a video of the acetone co-solvent precipitation (simply acetone added to concentrated vitamin-c tea extract as described in the previous post). Also, attached is a picture of what is scraped up after decanting/drying the acetone co-solvent. Notice the thin film of gink still present, I'm doing a dry acetone clean on what was scraped up.

 

[Loveall]

Just realized that the acetone cleanup was mentioned before by Infundibulum here. In that case methanol was used (here we are using acid vitamin water).

Anyone else try this acetone step to cleanup water or alcohol tinctures?

Any chemist know if (acetone + alcohol) and (acetone + acid water) clean ups precipitate the same stuff, or could they work together to clean up moar? Thanks.

 

[Loveall]

Update, extract crystalizes a lot better if a couple of drops of lechitin are added before drying in the oven. Very easy to scrape up and handle. Fluffy and loose. No smell of mushroom. It sparkles a lot too .

Still need to bioassay the newer acetone clean and lecithin assisted crystals. Attached is a picture of the new powder and a paper discussing crystalization effects from lecithin.

.3. Effect of lecithin
In the investigated chocolate model systems, lecithin showed a
pronounced impact on the kinetics of cocoa butter crystallisation
for the non-seeded samples, as well as for the seeded samples con-
taining cocoa butter and sugar. In the non-seeded samples with su-
gar and lecithin, it was possible to distinguish a heterogeneous
nucleation where fat crystals evolved from the sugar particle sur-
face, as indicated by a circle in Fig. 10(a). For the same samples, re-
sults obtained from the image analysis also showed a significant
increase in crystal growth rate compared to corresponding samples
without lecithin (Fig. 11(a)).