I have to perform alpha-amylase inhibition assay for which I extracted my plant sample with ethyl alcohol. Now I want to dissolve this extract in water because other sample is already dissolve in water.
Hi there,
Evaporate ethanol and dissolve the dry material in water. You might be confronted with solubility issue.
The problems are the smaller, the more water-soluble your compound of interest is. For very hydrophobic compounds, you may need the presence of detergent, or a two-phase system (water droplets with enzyme in organic solvent with CoI).
It also depends on how sensitive your enzyme is to ethanol (or other organic solvents like DMSO). Sometimes, you can add the ethanolic solution directly to your assay mix. Of course, then all assays (including controls) need to have the same ethanol concentration. Some enzymes can work in 1% or even 10% solvent, others can't.
The best option is to evaporate ethyl alcohol in a rotary evaporator and use the residue for dissolution in an aqueous buffer.
If your ethyl alcohol solution of your extract is concentrated enough and the extract has decent solubility in water, you can drop the ethyl alcohol solution of your extract into water directly, ethyl alcohol may help the extract soluble in water,
If solvent is completely evaporated you can work yield of residue. It shall be thence easy to use a particular concentration of the residual extract to determine it's biological activities.
- Badges
- Science topic
- Similar topics
- Microbiology
- Assays