Response to the Letter by Ghosh

Below, we would like to respond to the criticisms raised by Dr Ghosh1 to our recent article published in Circulation Research .2 1. Authenticity of the cDNA clones of cholesterol ester hydrolase (CES)1: We confirmed the nucleotide sequence of the cDNA clones of CES1 that were used for the experiments. In database, 3 variants of CES1 are registered. One of them is the cDNA reported by Dr Ghosh3 (NM\_001025194). We made expression vectors of this (NM\_001025194) and another variant (NM_001025195). Both vectors gave us the same results. Therefore, it is unlikely that our failure to reproduce the results reported by Dr Ghosh was attributable to amino acid changes in the clones. 2. Specificity of the antibodies against CES1: In our study, we used 2 different antibodies: one provided by Dr Hosokawa and the other generated by ourselves. We confirmed that both antibodies recognized the expressed CES1. As shown in the results of Western blot analysis (Figure 1C in our article), we obtained a single …