# STEROIDS FORUM > ANABOLIC STEROIDS - QUESTIONS & ANSWERS > EDUCATIONAL THREADS >  Atomini's thread on ESTERS: What they are, how they are formed, and their purpose!

## Atomini

*ESTERS: What they are, how they are formed, and their purpose*

This thread was a long time coming, and by all means I should have put this up before my trenbolone thread. Reason why this has taken so long is because I was waiting for admin to increase the direct-linked image limit on the forum to more than 5. I don't think he was able to do that, so i'm posting this now. Now, we already have threads on esters and their release times they grant different anabolic steroids , and information on how esters affect our cycles in the long run. The purpose of this thread is to educate people down to the chemistry of what an ester exactly is and how it is formed.

But what _is_ an ester? This is the question a lot of confused people tend to ask, especially by those who have no background in chemistry or those who have forgotten their basic highschool chemistry. And that's understandable! I have run into people on this forum who thought that esters were somehow these separate 'things' that were added to solutions to act as 'vehicles' for the anabolic steroids to do their job in the body. Obviously, this is a very wrong understanding of the subject at hand, and I felt the need to just give people a general refresher on basic chemistry and how these things work in order to correct this.

The origins of this thread started in a thread a while ago where I stated that *long esters hold a far heavier molecular weight than short estered steroids*. Therefore, on a mg for mg basis, *you are getting far more mg of steroid in a short estered compound vs a large estered compound*. For example, you are getting far more mg of testosterone in 600mg of test prop than 600mg of test enanthate . This is because of the shorter lighter weight to the propionate ester compared to the large heavy enanthate ester. You actually are getting MORE steroid in any given concentration of propionate than enanthate. I'll now explain why, and through this explanation you will also gain the understanding behind what an ester is and how these things work.

Unfortunately there will be no cited references for these things, because this is basic chemistry knowledge. Trust me, it is *VERY BASIC* chemistry. You can do the math yourself even if the last chemistry you did was in high school. The only reference I can site for you if you'd like to confirm all of this knowledge is to simply pick up any highschool chemistry textbook, it's all in there.

Now, here begins the small chemistry lesson and i've even taken the time here to photoshop pictures of chemical structures for you so that you may understand better. I'm also going to copy and paste direct from some of my older chemistry notes from school, since I have all the descriptions right here ready to go of what an ester bond is and how it is formed. The first thing to understand is that Testosterone is not an independant ingredient when it is colloquially known as 'Testosterone Enanthate ', or 'Testosterone Propionate '. Now the lesson shall begin:

Here is your basic bare-bones testosterone molecule:



What you have here is testosterone without an ester bonded to the molecule. Lets focus on testosterone propionate here in order to put this in perspective for you. Testosterone itself is a lipid (a fat), as it is cholesterol based. Its sterane structure makes it a fat (all steroid hormones are really fats), and this is why anabolic steroids work in the manner they do, by diffusing through the phospholipid bilayer membrane of the target cells. They are fat-soluble, so they can do this with ease. In comparison, protein hormones cannot do this as they are proteins, and not fats. Protein is not fat-soluble.

Now, here's a little refresher on lipids in general for you, copypasted straight from my chem notes:

_Fats and oils are made by attaching fatty acids to a glycerol molecule. The glycerol molecule - see page 16 in written notes. Glycerol molecules can react with the carboxylic acid part of up to 3 fatty acids producing up to 3 water molecules and either a fat or an oil molecule  see page 16 in written notes and page 52 in textbook. The resulting fat or oil molecule is called a triglyceride. Whether the fat or oil is solid or liquid in room temperature depends on whether or not the fatty acids in the triglyceride are polyunsaturated or a saturated. If the fatty acids are saturated, then its most likely a solid. If they are polyunsaturated, then its most likely a liquid. The shorter the chain lengths, the less the attraction between molecules, so therefore the smaller the chain then the more likely its an oil and the larger the chain, the more likely its a fat._

 

Alright, that's the basic low-down on fats. Now, here is where the ester bonding comes into play. Again, more from my chem notes:

_Whenever an alcohol-containing molecule reacts with a carboxylic acid-containing molecule such as a fatty acid reacting with glycerol, water molecules (H2O) are always produced and the bond between the newly united molecules is called an ester linkage (or, ester bond) and the process is called esterification (see page 40 in Arms & Camp textbook). The result is a molecule called a triglyceride.

Diagram of the esterification process: 



(3) Phospholipids 

Phospholipids are similar to triglycerides in that fatty acids are esterifying but the difference is that one of the alcohol groups is esterifying to a phosphate group (see page 40 in Arms & Camp textbook.)_



Alright, thats the basics on ester bonding. Now, back to testosterone propionate.... i've already posted a picture of the chemical strucutre of bare bones testosterone with no ester attached to it. Now, allow me to introduce you to our friend here, called Propionic Acid:

Attachment 125262

As you can see, its a very small molecule. I will now explain where the typical bonding area is when it esterifies (bonds) to other molecules (in this case, testosterone). So, what happens in a lab is a chemical reaction is produced whereby the propionic acid loses its OH group, and an H comes off the testosterone. The OH from the propionic acid, and the H from the testosterone bond to form H2O, and leave the molecule as such. Now, you have a newly formed chemical compound: *TESTOSTERONE PROPIONATE*.

Scroll up and take a look at the bare-bones testosterone picture. Now compare it with this, testosterone propionate:

Attachment 125263

Here, in case you haven't noticed, I took the liberty of outlining the area on the molecule that has now changed (or rather, an _addition_):

Attachment 125264

See where the OH is gone from the Propionic Acid? And how it is now bonded to testosterone? Once again, this forms *Testosterone Propionate*. It is no longer testosterone - peroid.

Here is a further 3D-ish picture of a Testosterone Propionate molecule I built out of my organic chemistry set (I originally posted this in a thread from a loooong time ago, here: http://forums.steroid.com/showthread...ight=chemistry )

Bare-bones testosterone:
Attachment 125265

Testosterone Propionate:
Attachment 125266

See the propionate attached to it?

What this esterification process does is enable the main compound (testosterone) to be released at slower rates in the body than if testosterone was un-estered to anything. Your body now has to send the anabolic steroid to the liver and use enzymes to cleave off that ester so that testosterone is in its bare-bones form again (which is the only form it can actually do its job and be used by the body). This is also THE reason why there is no such thing as site-specific growth except for AAS like testosterone suspension . Test suspension is simply un-esterified testosterone suspended in water. All esterified anabolic steroids must be processed by enzymes before they can be in their useable form. The longer the bigger the ester is, the longer it takes the body to cleave the ester off (hence the longer release times for esters like enanthate, undecanoate, etc.)

Alright, so the chemistry lesson is over. What does all this mean and how does it refer to the mg/ml stuff I was talking about earlier? Well, it's pretty simple at this point in case you haven't figured it out... the propionic acid has a particular molecular weight to it.... and testosterone has a particular molecular weight..

So at this point, its basic grade 2 math. You take the molecular weight of propionic acid and use this nifty little function on your calculator: + and punch in the molecular weight of bare-bones testosterone. Now you have the molecular weight of testosterone propionate. Now, it stands to reason that if you have a longer heavier ester attached to testosterone, your weight measurements of pure testosterone will become fudged because you now need to factor in the weight of the ester, because remember: testosterone is no longer *testosterone* when you have enanthate attached. It is now *testosterone enanthate*.

So, just a quick little re-cap:

Bare-bones Testosterone:

Attachment 125267

Testosterone Propionate: 

Attachment 125268

Testosterone + Propionic Acid = Testosterone Propionate .

Esters such as Propionate, Enanthate , Undecanoate, Acetate, etc. etc. etc. are literally bonded to the hormone in question to create, essentially, a new molecule. As such, the weight of the ester must be taken into account. You are NOT getting 100mg of testosterone when you are injecting testosterone propionate into yourself. You are getting slightly less mg of testosterone than you think. And the larger the ester is (such as enanthate or undecanoate), the far less testosterone (or whatever hormone is bonded to the ester) you are getting out of the total mg.

Once the enzymes in your body cleave off the propionate ester from testosterone propionate, you are left with pure testosterone. The weight of the molecule now weighs less as pure testosterone compared to when it was testosterone propionate. Therefore, you are now left with far less testosterone in your body than you originally thought.

And, just to end off, lets compare the actual chemical structures of proionic acid to that of enanthic acid:

Enanthic acid
Attachment 125269

Scroll up and take a look at propionic acid again (I cannot attach any more pics to this post - 8 max). Do you see the difference in how many more carbons enanthic acid has? This makes it much larger, and will require much more time for the body to cleave that ester off the testosterone molecule than for propionate. This is why you have vastly different half-life times for steroids bonded with enanthate compared to propionate.

Enanthate half life: approx 7-10 days

Propionate half life: approx 2 days

*A general example description of how much weight (in percentage) of a total mg weight is taken up by a given ester*

The chemistry lesson continues!

I will give a brief explanation on what moles (mol) are in the chemistry world so that you understand what's going on here. The Mole is a unit of measurement in chemistry, where things are so tiny and small and where chemical reactions often take place at a level where using grams doesn't work or doesn't make sense. Now, this may sound like ancient Greek to you, you won't understand this at all, but the proper official defition of mole is this: A mole is the quantity of _anything_ (testosterone, H20, carbon dioxide, cyanide, proteins, hydrogen ions, etc.) that has the same number of particles found in 12.000 grams of pure carbon-12 isotope. Now, this 'quantity' (the number of molecules of whatever we're discussing) is literally the exact same number for everything. And this number is... 6.023 X 10^23 (can also be expressed like this: 0.00000000000000000000006023. This number was originally discovered by the great chemist Amedeo Avogadro. This is also why the number is also known as 'Avogadro's number'. The number of molecules in a mole (known as Avogadro's number) is defined so that the mass of one mole of a substance, expressed in grams, is exactly equal to the substance's mean molecular weight. For example, the mean molecular weight of natural water is about 18.015, so one mole of water _is_ about 18.015 grams. This property considerably simplifies many chemical and physical computations.

So, we want to find out what % of a total mg weight in testosterone propionate is taken up by propionate. As such, we are going to continue using Testosterone Propionate as our example.

Lets find the molar mass of testosterone. Instead of pulling out the periodic table, and adding up the mass of all the carbon atoms, hydrogen atoms, etc. etc. in the testosterone molecule (because that would take too long), I am just going to pull it off wikipedia. Wikipedia tells me the molar mass of bare bones testosterone is: *288.42g/mol*. Now, lets grab the molar mass of Propionic Acid: *74.0g/mol*. We want the total molar mass of Testosterone Propionate, so we are going to add 288.42 and 74.0 together, which gives us *362.42g/mol* as the molar mass of _Testosterone Propionate_.

So, what now? Well, I _originally_ thought that we would have to convert g/mol into mg/ml but now that i'm right in the middle of doing this, I realize this is not necessary. All I would be doing is an extra complicated step that doesn't really help us find anything out, so we can just skip that. All we need to do is find out the percentage of weight that propionate occupies out of the whole 263.42g/mol, and then we can easily just apply that to any given mg/ml. All I need to do is divide the base weight (288.42 for test) by the ester and the base weight for a percentage. So, lets find this out: 

288.42 / 362.42 = 0.795817007

Now lets convert this into a percentage: 0.795817007 X 100 = 80% (rounded off)

So, basically... 80% of the total weight was taken up by testosterone, leaving us with 20% of the molecular weight taken up by propionate. Now, we can easily do this with mg. Lets take a look at 100mg of test prop (you don't even need to do the math for this since it is very simple, but here it is anyways):

0.20 X 100mg = 20mg of propionate

100mg - 20mg = *80mg bare-bones testosterone left over in 100mg of test prop*

Lets take a look at Testosterone Enanthate for a change. Testosterone: 288.42g/mol. Enanthic Acid: 130.18g/mol. Testosterone Enanthate: 288.42 + 130.18 = 418.6g/mol.

288.42 / 418.6 = 0.689010989

Convert to percentage: 0.689010989 X 100 = 69% (rounded off)

So, lets take a look at how much bare-bones testosterone you're left with in 500mg of Testosterone Enanthate.

0.69 X 500mg = 345mg testosterone is what you're left with in 500mg of testosterone enanthate

345mg - 500mg = 155mg of enanthate ester is what occupies that 500mg of testosterone enanthate

I hope this has broadened your understanding of what exactly an ester is, how it is formed, and how it affects total mg of substance! Here is some further reading for you on the understanding of ester half lives, and active life: http://forums.steroid.com/showthread...-and-Half-Life

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## Times Roman

probably shouldn't post this quality information in more than one thread. it get's too confusing otherwise...

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## Atomini

I know, I was thinking that doing this might get confusing for people. But I also figured it would be beneficial to have a copy here, since this is the educational threads forum. Eventually the main thread (in the Q&A forum) will get lost unless it's constantly bumped, and months from now for example, newbies and others won't see the thread because it will have fallen too far back.

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## t-dogg

Did you ever look into what we were talking about with detection times with esters?

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## Atomini

Jeez, I totally did not notice you posted here like half a month ago lol. I never pay attention to this section.

What were you asking about the detection times? I don't even remember  :Frown:

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## MickeyKnox

excellent info and another well written post! thanks Atomini.

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## tank6972

Awesome information I've been looking for this info all over online and couldn't find it you're a life saver!!

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## tigerspawn

Bump

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