Hi

There are many active substances in garlic extract each have different chemical properties, this requires us first to determine the active substances that we want to extract to choose the appropriate solvent later and also use more than one type of extraction and more than one type of solvent to compare them and choose the best

I hope the attached file will be useful for you

What might work (though I’d be extremely careful with how to handle it) could be thioacetone.

Although even with careful handling, a large amount as a solvent for separation might not be ideal because of the noxious nature of the stuff (in which I’d refer to the solvents in the article Hanan attached)

Maybe I’m thinking of a thioether like dimethyl sulfide (less harmful than thioacetone)

Garlic contains diallyl disulfide. I suppose that extract contain it too. This substance can form various polymeric products, which are less soluble or unsoluble. Maybe you should avoid heating and exposure to UV and oxidative atmosphere, this could help a bit.

Hi Brandon Veltri

I have tried dissolving the concentrated garlic in dimethyl sulfoxide but as I had mentioned, it does not fully dissolve. I have been trying to search online for bio-compatible alternatives for DMSO but I have had no luck. I extracted the phytochemicals again using a 1:1 of petroleum ether and diethyl ether from a new batch of garlic, wondering if the problem was the n-hexane, but I still had the same problem. It seems like the lipophilic compounds in garlic do not dissolve in DMSO.

I guess I should have asked what kind of compounds were being extracted. If they are mostly non-sulfur, lipophilic compounds then n-hexane and some of the others sounded like good options...

I suggested dimethyl sulfide because it’s isosteric with dimethyl ether and may help dissolving if the compound(s) of interest has sulfur (i.e. ajoene, allicin)

Hello, Nomfundo Nzama ! As i firstly misunderstand from your question, it was look like your lipophilic extract dont dissolve in hexane again, thats why you tried DMSO and alcohols. Now i see that i was wrong, and question is about lipophilic substances you extracted with hexane just do not dissolve in DMSO. Why you need them to be dissolved in DMSO or alcohols? Which further procedures you intend?

May be you should use isopropyl alcohol or chlorophorm.

Hi Mykola Volvach I need them to dissolve in DMSO or alcohols so that I can do cytotoxiciy testing on my MCF-7 breast cancer cell line.

The authors from the article Hanan attached use ethanol and water to extract the compounds.

I wonder if beta-mercaptoethanol or DTT would work or if they would covalently

react with the garlic compounds

I suppose that cytotoxicity testing protocol could mimic that environment, where such substance may interact with that cells. So, if these materials are insoluble or poorly soluble - it must mean that you obtained solution saturated in this conditions. Therefore measured value can be understood as "cytotoxycity of saturated solution". But you need to check your protocol definitions - what it's result should really mean.

Also maybe you can use less polar solvents for stock solution and then dilute it with alcohol/DMSO, but you should pick a solvent which is not supposed itself to harm cells in such test.

Brandon Veltri there is a lot of solvents that I could use (e.g. chloroform) that are would solubilise my lipophilic compounds but they aren't considered biocompatible. They would be extremely toxic to my cells. I wonder if the two you suggested are, I will take a look.

Mykola Volvach I have tried less non-polar solvents and I still experience this problem. However, with polar solvents, the extraction is fine. So the lipophilic compounds that are extracted with non-polar solvents are insoluble in DMSO and I am not sure which solvents they are soluble in. I researched the solubility of the different lipophilic bioactive compounds that are extracted from garlic and most websites mention DMSO and alcohols but this does not seem to be the case in my situation.