solvent for my Duranta erecta fruit extract

[jul8]

Hello!!!!!!!!!!!

Am........... I just wanna ask if the Duranta erecta fruit extract water soluble???... If not, what other solvent can we use??


Thank in advance!

[hhemken]

I was not able to find anything. This is not a bad thing, on the contrary, you are doing something new and unpublished!

I suggest you do extracts with whatever solvents you can find easily, such as water, acetone, alcohol, etc. It may be difficult for you to evaporate off the solvents. DO NOT USE FLAME to boil off flammable solvents such as alcohols, acetone, paint solvents, etc. IT IS VERY DANGEROUS!

An alternative is to ask a chemistry teacher to help you use a rotavapor (research this) to remove the solvent in the lab. If your school does not have one, try asking a chemistry professor at a local college or university for help.

The extracts themselves can be prepared by grinding up the fruits and letting them soak in a relatively small amount of solvent for a few days or a week in a warm but dark place. Keep them away from any kind of flames or sparks, and keep them in well-sealed bottles or jars. You may want to shake them once or twice a day. You should ask your science teacher for help with this.

If you are not able to get the use of a rotavapor, you can still do your experiment. Here are some possible treatment groups:

Group 1: Plain water
Group 2: Water extract of Duranta
Group 3: Plain alcohol
Group 4: Alcohol extract of Duranta
Group 5: Plain Acetone
Group 6: Acetone extract of Duranta
Group 7: Plain paint thinner
Group 8: Paint thinner extract of Duranta

As you can see, you need to compare the effects of the plain solvent with those of the extract using that solvent. If the extract is significantly more toxic to your test organism than the solvent alone, then you can conclude that your extract has the toxic compound in it. In a future experiment, you could try to purify it.

In order to see wheteher such statistically significant effects exist, you need to do the following:

1) Perform five trials per group, and get one or more numerical measures of toxicity. You need to measure the same things in each treatment group in the same way. The groups need to be treated in exactly the same difference, with the only difference being the solvent or the extract applied.
2) Calculate the average and standard deviation per group for each of the measures you obtained in step 1. Research what average and standard deviation are if necessary.
3) Using a spreadsheet like Excel or OpenOffice (openoffice.org), calculate a Student's t Test between all of the treatment groups. Research this if necessary. This is critically important. This test is not very difficult or complicated to do (get assistance from your science teacher if necessary). It will give you an objective meqasure of whether any one of your treatment groups has a statistically significant difference in toxicity as compared to any other. This test will be the answer to your hypothesis. In order for this to work well, you need to have five or more trials or test subjects per treatment group (research this).


This has the potential for being a novel and clean scientific experiment. How do you intend to test the extracts?