Who says submerged culture of Claviceps is preferable to exploiting profuse native morning glories to get lysergic goodies?
SWIM wanted to check the morning glories of her native environment, on a hunch. The hunch came from persistent reports of allergy / toxicity at the touch of morning glory foliage, in Mesoamerica and in North America. Large effects from trace amounts is a lysergic specialty, and mg's don't have a bunch of other bad alkaloids in them. Everybody says morning glory seeds only, and then just from certain varieties.
So thinking such thoughts, SWIM hopped out and gathered up a bunch of wild plants, genus ipomoea. She performed extraction procedures on the first 4 spp. of wild or feral mg's she found, with 2 domestic varieties, blue and purple, for comparison.
So SWIM extracted in this wise: the air-dried plant material was macerated, then moistened with 0.1 N sodium carbonate aq. to free the base. The material was percolated in a column with 1 liter petroleum ether added dropwise over 6 hours. Dilute acid, SWIM said 0.02 N HCl, was used to extract the hopeful-amide from the nonpolar solvent, in three vigorous washings (200, 200, 100 ml) in a 2-liter bottle. Coincidentally, that same bottle was used as separatory funnel, by inverting it and carefully loosening the cap.
But that ain't the point. The point is, that SWIM worked under black light all she could, to see what was going on. She saw florescence in the layers, giving visual feedback on the progress of the separations. The more concentrated the alkaloid, the brighter it glowed, typical of the indole ring alkaloids. In this case, SWIM figured glow meant LAA, lysergic acid amide, because morning glories don't have any appreciable amounts of any other lysergic acid derivatives, nor any other indole alkaloids, nor any other alkaloids at all.
So after the brightly-glowing aqueous fraction was cut out, SWIM made the solution basic with ammonia, giving a flocculent precipitate which took forever to settle out. But it glowed.
SWIM did this on all 6 plant materials, and the situation was the same with all the extracts of morning glory whole plants. Making the same type extraction on crushed domestic seeds did produce a greater concentration of product, as might be expected.
But I says to Swim, I says look. The respectable books and sources and stuff all say it ain't true, you can't get lysergic stuff except from the seeds, and just certain kinds of seeds, and better you just go score Hawaiin Wood Rose and forget plain old morning glories, but you just proved them wrong. Six times out of six tries, you got glowing alkaloids from the leaves, and vines, and stems, and tendrils, and seed cases, and stuff like that all mixed together. So is somebody trying to hide something, or did you just get lucky?
SWIM says, well fuck that, the real reason to use morning glories is because there's only one compound worth worrying about, but if you use ergot you need to fool with seventeen different types of ergotosnotalines.
Well this is a cliff hanger, and SWIM isn't real happy about using ammonia because it makes the ppt. way too puffy and hard to filter for the next stage, but she just persisted with the same technique so all the batches would be treated the same, so she could compare them.
Next time I spot her, I'll ask her how it's going.
Half-a-Pint
Half a pint's a half a pound, a half the world around, around.