What is the acid step really doing?

[AluminumFoilRobots]

Hello all!

So I have been thinking about extracting a lot lately and I realized that I don't specifically know what the acid is really doing. I mean, I know the alkaloids are already in a water-soluble salt form (tannate usually, right?), and in q21q21's TEK, he states that the acid step works to speed up the process so that it doesn't take 48 plus hours to complete as it would (which would make it q21q21's STB I guess).

So my question is this: if the alkaloids are already in a water-soluble salt form, then what it the purpose of changing that salt to a different one (say, acetate as in this TEK). Is the acetate more soluble than the tannate? How does adding vinegar speed up q21q21's? How does this work?

I know this is a really basic question but I'm just trying to build my knowledge base to become a more proficient extractor

 

[benzyme]

protonating the terminal amine.

that is, hydronium ions in acidic solution impart a positive charge on the nitrogen where the methyl groups are bound. this makes the alkaloid more water soluble, and separable from phytolipids

 

[corpus callosum]

DMT Extraction Overview - FAQ - All your basic questions and answers - Welcome to the DMT-Nexus

Thanks to Entropymancer for this excellent post which answers the OPs query, plus a whole lot more besides.

 

[AluminumFoilRobots]

Ah ok.

So I just did some research on Amines, Dimethylamine, tryptamine, and dimethyltryptamine, as well as monoamines in general. I must say that while I seem to have gained enough base knowledge to make these articles not TOTALLY oblique, but still a little hard to understand fully in a real-to-life manner.

I'll be doing some more research on this... but is there any way that you could shed some light on "protonating the amine"? I mean, I get that a proton is getting added to the amine portion of the, say, DMT molecule - how does this speed up the extraction process? Also, I see that an amine is the Ammonia molecule which has 1, 2, or 3 substituents where the hydrogens go... but which part of the DMT molecule is the amine? The chain? Is that called an "amine chain" or something like that? Attached to what?

Thanks for giving me that much, benzyme!

EDIT: thanks corpus!

 

[AluminumFoilRobots]

Sorry, just read your edited post, benzyme. Thanks for that addition!