University of Manchester Medical School M13 9PT Manchester, United Kingdom
Address correspondence to: Isobel P. Braidman, Ph.D., Musculoskeletal Research Group, University of Manchester Medical School, Stopford Building, First Floor, Oxford Road, M13 9PT Manchester, United Kingdom.
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 1012, 2000. It is
clear that neither ER nor ERß 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 ERß
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; 16:214220). In this paper we draw attention to
the distinction we made in our discussion section between our
observations of ERß 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
ER
and ERß 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 ER
mRNA expression in
osteoblasts, as this paper described ER
protein expression in bone
cells, using indirect immunofluorescence. ER
mRNA expression has
been reported by our group (Hoyland et al., 1997,
Bone 20:8792) using in situ RT-PCR.
Received July 13, 2001.
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