General Alkaloid Extraction Process

I'm getting into alkaloid extraction from various ethnobotanicals. It is a bit frustrating trying to extract alkaloids from ethnobotanicals without good guides out there, and I wanted to make my own techniques and experiments. However, I need to know what the basic outline is for extraction. Are there any guides or basic principles I need to know? 


I'm interested in extracting for example Leonurine from Wild Dagga or Mitragyna and 7-OH-Mitragyna from Kratom.




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What I was looking for was Acid-Base or Liquid-Liquid extractions.




### 7-Hydroxymitragynine


The extraction and crystallization of the parent alkaloid, **mitragynine**, from dried leaves of *Mitragyna speciosa* (Kratom), has been described in great detail by *A. H. Beckett, E. J. Shellard* and *A. N. Tackie* in *Planta Med.*, **1965**, *13*, 241-246 ([DOI](http://dx.doi.org/10.1055/s-0028-1100118)).


(Interestingly, the procedure also furnished **speciofoline**, a spiroindolo indolizidine alkaloid.)


### Leonurine


A first extraction was seeming reported by *S. Kubota* and *S. Nakajima* in *Nippon Yakubutsuqaku Zasshi*, **1930**, 153. I don't have a DOI and the source is most likely in Japanese.


I don't have personal experience with the extraction of guanidines from biological material and would probably rather try to synthesize **leonurine**, following the procedures described in *Tetrahedron*, **1969**, *25*, 5155-5161 ([DOI](http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/0040-4020(69)80036-0)).




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### General guidelines


I have given some hints on extraction in an answer to a question on the use of [TLC in alkaloid identification](https://chemistry.stackexchange.com/questions/63620/how-do-i-perform-thin-layer-chromatography-to-identify-alkaloid-content-in-fruit/63634#63634).


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