Substance appearing in Steroid-containing Plasma Extracts after Ingestion of Tea or Coffee

IN the course of paper chromatography of chloroform extracts of human plasma several ultra-violet absorbing spots, in addition to that produced by cortisol, have frequently been encountered, both by ourselves and by others1. Attention was directed to one of these when it was found that in the fasting state it was no longer detectable. (In our experiments the plasma was extracted three times with 1.5–3 volumes of chloroform. A clean extract was obtained by mixing the plasma with one-fortieth volume N sodium hydroxide immediately prior to the first extraction2.)