Experiment Gallery
Daily Notes
Was disposing of a tobacco plant (had been gene gun testing on it). Lightly mashed a few leaf chunks in a little ethanol, to get a bright green extract. Ran a TLC plate with ethyl acetate and a big spot (10+ uL) of the extract. Nothing visible under UV. A few grains of lye and a sprinkle of KMnO4 in water as a stain brought out lovely colors though :) A second run with some ethanol + water added to the EA and a smaller dot gave a streak rather than a nice spot, the plain EA was better.
Not guaranteed the main spot is nicotine but given that it's, what, 1-2% by dry weight of the leaves, soluble in ethanol, seems pretty likely I would guess. r.f. 38mm/46mm = 0.83 ish.
Not recommending replication, if you do, be careful - this is a highly soluble toxin that migrates across skin easily. I was goggled and gloved and less cavalier than usual, and successfully maintained my "have never experienced nicotine" lifetime streak. Leaves, remaining extract etc. were carefully disposed of. I'm documenting this experiment partly since I realised after the fact that scientific curiosity might not be the first motive one might assume if they found evidence of extracting and testing alkaloids haha.