U-DE REVIERS ET AL.

TESTOSTERONE STIMULATION BY PMSG IN OVJNE MALE 25

therefore the sensitivity was 300 pg per ml plasma for the direct assay, and
about 420 pg for the assay with extraction.

Accuracy. A parallelism test was applied to six ram plasma samples. They
were either extracted and assayed against testosterone standards diluted in
buffer ( data not shown), or directly assayed against testosterone standards
diluted in steroid-free plasma (Fig. 1). Under both conditions, lines obtained
with the plasma samples were parallel to the standards curve (P<0.05).
Accuracy of the direct assay was also checked by assaying 15 unknown ram
plasma samples, with or without the extraction step (Fig. 2). The equation of
the regression line was y= l. 07 x + O .11 and the correlation coefficient was
highly significant (P<0.001 ). The direct assay was used for the further
experiments.

WITHOUT EXTRACTION
testosterone (ng/ml)
25

], *,X,+,◊, 6.)
an values (n=5).
20
./
C• .i'
¡uilibrium. Sep­
15
/
❖,;,\''.
.,)
�· ._,,-- .
munoprecipita­ 10
0,�'/A
i, was added to
:, 2 ml of poly­ 5

! centrifuged at
1tants were dis­ 5 10 15 20 25
binding, 100 µl testosterone (ng/ml ) WITH EXTRACTION
1 of scintillation Fig. 2. Relationship between testosterone assay including the extraction step and testosterone
• tubes were left "direct assay". Each ram plasma sample was either extracted (five replicates) and assayed in
arb liquid scin­ duplicate, or was directly assayed ( ten replicates). Mean values.
ulations, a logit
) was used. TABLE 1

Precision of the direct testosterone assay in ram plasma

!d the program Plasma Testosterone B/B0 Coefficient of variation ( %)
! performed ac- no. level
(ng/ml) within assay between assay
(n=20) (n=4)
1 0.35 91 18 29
2 3.28 56 3.6 12
3 10.6 26 4.1 13

� extraction was

,tosterone, and