Hydrolysis of urinary conjugated 17-ketosteroids by acetate buffer.

It has long been recognized that the usual methods for cleavage of steroidal conjugates by strong acids may effect various transformations (1). In an earlier publication (1) one particular alteration, the conversion of a 3&hydroxy-17-ketosteroid to a non-digitonin-precipitable (“a”)-17-ketosteroid’ by standard HCl hydrolysis was studied. This conversion could be avoided by use of the hydrolytic procedure devised for sodium dehydroisoandrosterone sulfate in water or urine by Talbot et al. (2) with barium chloride in acetate buffer, pH 5.8. The present paper reports a series of experiments designed to determine (a) the essential factors involved in this hydrolytic procedure and (b) the nature of the conjugated 17-ketosteroids of normal male urine which are hydrolyzed by this treatment.