Hello everyone,
I hope these words find you well.
I used 80% methanol (solvent) for seaweed's extraction. I have performed rotary evaporator extraction in order to evaporate methanol but there is water in my final extract, I need to remove that water so that I may perform my further clinical experiments. Please help me in solving my issue, I will look forward to your kind and swift response.
Thank you
Kind Regards,
Samreen
Hi,
You should be working on dry biological material. The algae must be dried (40 ° C in the shade for 24 hours for example) before extraction with 80% methanol. Otherwise, the water can be evaporated quickly and efficiently under vacuum.
Good luck.
Rotary evaporator can take care of the methanol in your extract and in fact, if you have a very good vacuum pump, it does also remove most of the water in your extract. At 55-degree centigrade setting, some of our pumps can indeed remove water. There could always be residual water and to change it to a truly powder form (if not oily extract), you need to freeze-dry the extract. The standard method of water removal is in fact freeze-drying but because it takes long time to remove water, whatever you can remove by rotary evaporator initially is a bonus.
I am not sure if it is suitable or not for your analysis, but as a feasible alternative practice, you can try applying hygroscopic salts in the salting-out applications or at cartridge forms.
İsmail Emir Akyildiz Thank you so much sir for your kind suggestion, I will surely go for it if find suitable.
Sebastian Schmitt
Thank you sir for your answer, I will keep that in mind.Solomon Habtemariam Thanks you sir for your answer.
Abderrahmane Zekhnini Thank you sir for your kind help.
80% ethanol is okay? or I need to use 99.99% methanol?
Try measuring if there is a significant difference in using 100% methanol in the total amount of the molecules you are interested in. If not, use 100% methanol instead of 80%, we have used this in some samples and found no significant differences on the total phenolic content of our samples.
If you do not have a very good vacuum pump you can add some pure methanol to the exctract and evaporate again at the rotavapor. Repeat this procedure several times until you will find a dry extract. You can also use acetone instead of methanol.
I will suggest that you subject the said extract to freeze-drying if you have a freeze-drier in your laboratory.
It can use a rotary evaporator to obtain thicker extract then dried using either a blower oven (40-50 °C) or a freeze-drier.
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