Abstract
Human adrenal tissue from a fetus aborted after 6 month's gestation was sliced to 30μ thickness and incubated with estradiol-17β-16-14C in Krebs-Ringer bicarbonate buffer solution. The estriol fraction from the incubation mixture was purified by gradient elution partition chromatography on a Celite column, paper chromatography and thin layer chromatography to constant specific activity. Throughout these purification steps, the radioactive metabolite in the estriol fraction behaved exactly as the added carrier standard estriol. It was, therefore, considered that estradiol-17β-16-14C was converted to estriol by the incubation experiment with the fetal adrenal tissue. The overall conversion rate was 1.1%. In addition, the possible role of a fetus in the formation of estriol during pregnancy was discussed.
