Post Rater, What I meant by “I plan to,” is “If one were to.”
Lili, thank you for the corrections—I made the embarrassing mistake of thinking that ethyl acetate was more polar than methanol and that tertiary amine was more polar than primary. If this impurity redness is on account of the skatole, then it would be expected for the DMT to come out after the skatole(orange/red spot), but before the tryptamine, correct? How confident of this should one be; would it be a mistake to not start collecting fractions until the colored band clears the column?
Kurupira, I also appreciate how valuable this technique is for extractions of the natural product. It seems very difficult to obtain crystals from a raw a/b extraction.
The hydrochloride salt will crystallize regardless of impurity. If one were to botch this chromatography, gassing the oil dissolved in ether would be a good way to store the mixture before next attempt, right? Is there advantages to other salts(tartarate, oxalate, fumarate) that people speak of? Do they crystallize easier or are they gentler on the 2-position?
Would a small amount of charcoal be helpful for initial purification?
Does anyone have anything to say about vacuum distillation instead of the column? Is decomposition an issue?