thank you everybody for your replies (also via pm
).
you have reawakened my interest in this method
water immiscible is a must, since the goal is to extract
from basic H2O(+DMSO). ethyl acetate seems to be a good
guess, i've found a journal article giving some partition
values of tryptamine for some solvent/water systems. ethyl
acetate comes very close to chloroform. still the low values
somewhat scare me. iirc the log(P) for ethylacetate is 1.47
that gives a value in the range of 25 for P.
i have another question(s):
the blue copper chelate compound, how many molecules are there
per Cu? i guess it's 3. the anion is still acetate, right?
if it's really 3 mols Trp per Cu, and one uses an excess of
CuAc2, wouldn't one end up with a wild mixture of mono-, di-,
and tri-, conjugated (associated?) molecules?
the reason i want to know this is so that i can do correct yield
calculations.
also, the yield of 45% in the original article is that starting from
Trp or from the copper compound?
thx.
edit: thinking about this, the anion is probably tryptophan itself.
and there are probably 2 ligands. still i have no idea how this
compound really looks like.
edit #2:
here are the log(P) values of tryptamine in water/solvent systems:
source: J.Chem.Soc.,Perkin Trans. 2, 2002, 470-477
octanol: 2.147 (measured in this work)
octanol: 1.35 (MedChem 2001 Database)
chloroform: 1.526 (measured in this work)
cyclohexanone: -0.599 (measured in this work)
toluene: 0.268 (measured in this work)
benzene: 1.07 (MedChem 2001 Database, ion correction was applied)
ethyl acetate: 1.41 (MedChem 2001 Database)