Differential expression and comparative subcellular localization of estrogen receptor beta isoforms in virally transformed and normal cultured human lens epithelial cells.

A number of variants of the wild-type (wt) estrogen receptor beta (ERbeta-1) coexist in a wide range of tissues. In the human these include, together with others, the expression of several isoforms (ERbeta-2-ERbeta-5) due to alternative splicing of exons encoding the carboxy terminus. In this study, we determined whether virally transformed cell cultures of human lens epithelial cells (HLE-B3) express both full length (or wt) and variant isoforms of ERbeta in comparison to normal secondary cultures of human lens epithelial cells (nHLE) and furthermore, identify the subcellular localization of the wtERbeta-1 and ERbeta isoform variants in HLE-B3 and nHLE cells, as well as from human breast adenocarcinoma cells (MCF-7) which provided a positive control.