/  print page

Estrogen receptor β overexpression

Estrogen receptors (ER) mediate the effects of estrogen in various normal and malignant cells. While ERα is an established clinical marker, the meaning of ERβ still needs to be clarified. The expression of ERβ in conventional human mammary carcinoma cell lines is extremely low or even lost.
We established a breast cancer MCF-7 cell line, that stably expresses a detectable level of full length ERβ due to a pEGFP-N1 vector. MCF-7/ERβ expresses inherent ERα and shows a reduced proliferation rate as well as a modified morphology. In contrast to wild type cells, MCF-7/ERβ does not grow as tumour in immunodeficient nude mice. For internal control a mock-transfected MCF-7 line is available.

Figure 2 Expression of ERαlpha (a) and ERβ (b) mRNA in MCF-7/wt, MCF-7/mock and MCF-7/ERβ monitored by RT-PCR. Detection of b-Actin was used as loading control in both assays. Lane 1, Molecular weight marker, Lane 2, Negative control (H2O); Lane 3, Positive control (ERα/ERβ-cDNA); Lane 4, MCF-7 wild-type; Lane 5, MCF-7/ERβ; Lane 6, MCF-7/GFP.

Top