Abstract
Estrogen-based cancers affect a substantial portion of the female population in the United States. While multiple studies have examined the effect of estrogen receptor alpha (ERα/ESR1) in cancer, the effects of ERβ/ESR2 are not as well understood in tumor tissues. Furthermore, there are few studies examining the role of specific binding partners of the estrogen receptors, such as early B-cell factor 1 (EBF1). EBF1 has been shown to have a role in B cell development and differentiation and is also known to bind to and crosstalk with both ERα and ERβ. However, to date those studies have only been performed in vitro in one breast cancer cell line. Therefore, it is imperative that we determine if there is a clinical role for that interaction. To that end, we utilized a bioinformatics approach to examine EBF1, ESR1, and ESR2 gene expression levels in patient tumor tissues from estrogen-based cancers of the breast, cervix, ovary, and uterus. Our results show a correlation between EBF1 and ESR1 or ESR2 expression, as well as some crosstalk regulation between EBF1 and ESR2, but the relationship between EBF1 and ESR1 is inconsistent across cancers. Furthermore, contrary to previous reports, we did not find a significant loss of EBF1 expression across all cancer types. Taken together, these results indicate that there is still much we do not understand about this interaction in clinical samples and provide an area for future studies.
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