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'Oh, you can't help that' said the Cat: 'we're all mad here. I'm mad. You're mad.' 'How do you know I'm mad?' said Alice. 'You must be,' said the Cat, 'or you wouldn't have come here.'

The last thing I extracted I did not defat; I used a soxhlet, and the fat floated on the top of the solution; refrigeration got the fat to coagulate into globs that could just be scooped out. Is DMT fat soluble?  Also, could the beans be defatted chemically and then fermentation used to extract and proceed from there?  Third question, the last thing worked with was a large seed, bigger than this.  The seed was not ground up but used as is and seemed to work fine that way.  I have read that grinding plant materials causes chemical changes to occur on the broken surfaces.  I know that maceration is typically a first step in extracting from plants, but would you happen to know whether it has a negative effect on the chems in question or how I could find that out? Thank you for your very detailed and helpful post.

Maceration is typically used in most quantitative and qualitative plant analyses, so I'm guessing that the level negative aspects involved in this is low...extracting whole plant matter does work, but tends to result in lower yields...

I thought, if my memory serves me right, that the
wanted part of the Mucuna plant are the leaves and
not the beans, with the leaves having such a high
concentration of DMT that they can be inhaled without
further modifications.

Does anyone have any refs concerning alkaloid content
in Mucuna pruriens? I got something here:

Oh yeah, sorry, mucuna beans composition:

DMT, DMT-N-oxide, 5-MeO-DMT, L-Dopa, Bufotenine and beta carbolines

(Encyclopaedia of psychoact. plants. Raetsch, Christian)

OK, this is settled then.

- phaidon

Bhattacharya, S.K., Sanyal A.K. & Ghosal S.: Ind J Phys 25(2); 53-56

Remmen, Shirley F.A. and Ellis B.E.: "DOPA synth in non-producer cultures
of M. deeringiana", PhytoChem 19: 1421 - 1423

Hope it helps.

- phaidon

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The leaves can be smoked for mild tryptamine effects, which can be prolonged by MAO inhibitors (Danger!! Please read page on MAOI's). Similarly, the beans themselves can be used this way and have often been proposed as an ayahuasca analogue.

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The quote is from the shaman-australis website found at: http://www.shaman-australis.com/Website/subcat84.htm

In the PDF mentioned in the above posts, it does say that alkaloids are found in the roots, stems, leaves, pods and seeds, but the levels they found are too low to be considered psychoactive without an extraction on huge amounts of plant material. The table on page 8 of the PDF says that the plant part with the most Bufotenine is the leaves with 8.29 µg per gram dry weight. So you would need 603 grams of dried leaf for a 5 mg dose of Bufotenine.

The table also says that the most 5-MeODMT found was 2.73 µg per gram dry weight from the leaves of the Benin variety, and 2.79 µg per gram dry weight equivalent from the stems of the Gainesville fresh plants cultivar ECHO 91080 991E. So for a 5 mg dose of 5-MeODMT the smallest amount of plant material you would need is 1792 grams of dried weight equivalent of stem. Because the table was standardized to give the figures in dried weigh, if you used fresh stem, you would probably need around 12.5 kilos, as stems tend to be about 70% water as opposed to leaves which tend to be around 90% water.

So this report clearly states in several places that the tryptamine alkaloid concentration in Mucuna pruriens is too low to have a psychoactive effect. After much searching of the internet, I only found a few references to a psychedelic effect from Mucuna pruriens, one didn’t mention what plant part or how much was used, and the other was a reference to Jonathan Ott’s Ayahuasca Analogues. I thought that perhaps this contrast was due to a faulty extraction method, as experiments with Virola bark has shown that aqueous extracts don’t work, and alkaloids are only recovered if dry ethanol is used for the starting solvent. So I though that perhaps enzymes were breaking down the alkaloids giving the false impression of a low alkaloid concentration in Mucuna pruriens. But on page 7 of the PDF in the section “Sample extraction” it states:

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Suitability of the extraction method for the indolic alkaloids (~95% recovery) had previously been determined through a recovery study in which a mixed standard containing all analytes was added to ground seed samples at a level of 0.05% dry wt.

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So I feel very confident that the authors of this study knew what they were doing, and that their conclusion that Mucuna pruriens does not contain enough tryptamine alkaloids for a psychoactive effect is accurate.

An extraction of Mucuna pruriens seeds to obtain L-dopa to use for increasing mescaline content in cacti is an area that could be a much more promising use for this plant. And L-dopa extraction and purification is something I’d like to learn more about.