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Isobel P. Braidman, Judith A. Hoyland, Peter Selby, Comment on “Estrogen Receptors α and β Are Differentially Expressed in Developing Bone” (JCEM, 2001; 86:2309–2314), The Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism, Volume 86, Issue 11, 1 November 2001, Page 5640, https://doi.org/10.1210/jcem.86.11.8029
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To the editor:
Research into ER expression in bone is developing rapidly and is attracting considerable interest, due to its implications both for normal bone function and bone diseases. To include the latest advances and observations, it is inevitable that reference is made to abstracts of work presented at meetings, with all the attendant problems of accurate interpretation of these brief reports. We wish to draw your attention to some errors and inaccuracies in the references quoted in the above paper which have, unfortunately, resulted in misrepresentation of work published from our own group. The most important of these concerns Ref. 25 (Batra et al., 2000, J Bone Miner Res 15:1222). This is an abstract of a paper presented to the meeting of the Bone and Tooth Society, held in Cambridge, United Kingdom, July 10–12, 2000. It is clear that neither ERα nor ERβ expression in chondrocytes was included in that abstract. In the Discussion section of their paper, however, Bord et al. state that “Nilsson et al. (14, 24) identified immunoreactivity only in hypertrophic chondrocytes; similar findings were reported by Batra et al. (Ref. 25), who identified ERβ exclusively in hypertrophic cells of wax-embedded sections from human fracture callus.” Other work from our group was presented at the same meeting, and this has been published without alteration as a full paper in the February issue of the Journal of Bone and Mineral Research (2001; 16:214–220). In this paper we draw attention to the distinction we made in our discussion section between our observations of ERβ expression in cartilage cells with those of Nilsson et al.; clearly our observations disagree with theirs. We are particularly concerned over this inaccuracy in the paper by Bord et al., as it was used to explain differences in reported observations on the basis of certain aspects of technique and method, but other explanations (e.g. developmental change in ERα and ERβ expression) were neglected. Bord et al. were, after all, using embryonic bone, whereas we studied bone from adults. We also point out a more minor inaccuracy; Braidman et al. (Ref. 9) did not report ERα mRNA expression in osteoblasts, as this paper described ERα protein expression in bone cells, using indirect immunofluorescence. ERα mRNA expression has been reported by our group (Hoyland et al., 1997, Bone 20:87–92) using in situ RT-PCR.
