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Topic: Landis tested positive - interesting chemistry behind  (Read 5178 times)

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Offline Borek

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Landis tested positive - interesting chemistry behind
« on: August 29, 2006, 08:18:24 AM »
Landis is a cyclist who won this year's Tour de France but was later found cheating with testosterone. I have just found an interesting post at sci.chem, by Eric Lucas:

Quote
First line screening looks for an epimer of natural testosterone, not an enantiomer--an epimer has one isomerized chiral center, as opposed to being entirely of the opposite handedness.  Since the synthetic stuff is almost certainly made by elaborating some other readily-available naturally occurring steroid, most of the chiral scaffolding of the molecule is already fixed, with only one or two chiral centers introduced in the synthesis. After a positive first-line screen, the second-line screen is based on the C-13 content.  My understanding is that the unusual epi-testosterone ratio can (not likely, but can) occur due to abnormal but natural metabolic processes, but an unusual C-13 content is unequivocally from man-made material.
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Offline Borek

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Re: Landis tested positive - interesting chemistry behind
« Reply #1 on: November 09, 2006, 06:22:08 AM »
Ahh, sometimes there is nothing like browsing blogs:

testosterone_carbon_isotopes_and_floyd_landis
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