Comparison of plasma corticosterone- and progesterone-binding activity in rat and human.

Corticosterone-and progesterone-binding activity were measured by saturation analysis, with dextran-charcoal separation, in plasma obtained from male and female rats, and a normal male and female human. In plasma from normal male and female rats, progesterone was much less effective than corticosterone in displacing 3H-corticosterone from plasma protein binding sites although the parallelism of the displacement curves indicated competition for the same binding sites. In plasma from the normal male human, corticosterone and progesterone were equally effective in displacing 3H-corticosterone. However, 3H-progesterone showed no apparent binding to either rat or human plasma proteins, suggesting that dextran-charcoal effectively removed progesterone from transcortin binding sites at 4 degrees C. This observation was confirmed by multiple equilibrium dialysis. In dialysis, 3H-corticosterone and 3H-progesterone were bound equally by human plasma, but rat plasma bound 3H-corticosterone to a much greater extent than it did 3H-progesterone. These data indicate that, in contrast to human plasma, rat plasma has much greater affinity for corticosterone than for progesterone.