Plant is having abundant amount of mucilage. So the extract is resemble to tar. It is difficult to dissolve it for the chemical reactions using different concentrations.I tried with the same solvent. But that is also not working properly.
"Tried with the same solvent"- which solvent do you mean?
What sort of compounds are you trying to react? You will probably need to extract it from the rest of the plant before doing the "chemical reaction" (which I take to mean is a reaction with another chemical).
Dear Sumin Mary Jose,
First we need to know the type of plant sample you are working on and the preliminary processing method you adopted. By this, one can recommend you the best way to extract and study your chemical of interest.
Regards.
Thank you for your kind response.I have just done a simple methanolic extraction using my plant powder. I got crude extract. This is so sticky when dried.It may be due to abundant amount of mucilage or oil. It is not dissolving even in methanol and I tried with DMSO. But that is also not working properly. I have to use this crude extract for my in vitro experiments (such as anti bacterial tests).
Have you tried defatting of your plant material using petroleum ether or directly go for the extraction using methanol.
I have directly done the extraction using methanol. How to do defatting? Is it simply adding petroleum ether to the plant powder ?
I think it will be better if you fractionate your methanolic extract using hex, chloroform and ethyl acetate in that order, after which you should test the solubility of the resulting extracts in DMSO.
Best wishes
The mucilage or oils could be trapping water from the plant in your extract, so you may want to try some water in with your DMSO or methanol. You may want to try extracting your plant with different solvents such as acetone, ethanol, butanol, etc. Another thing to try is a modified Kupchan partition scheme. Add hexane to the aqueous methanol layer in a sep funnel. Process hexane layer separately. Then add MTBE to the same aq MeOH layer, ditto. Then add chloroform to .. ditto. Chloroform goes to bottom of sep funnel. Usually you have a big yield in this one. you are left with a dilute aqueous methanolic layer and you can partition that with butanol or ethyl acetate. In this way you fractionate molecules roughly based on polarities. Then try TLC separations like Jack Silver above can recommend.
If you think that this problem may be due to fatty materials present in the extract you can go for defatting using petroleum ether (60-80ºC) for 72 h to remove fatty materials
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