1980 Articles

SV40 and Cellular Gene Expression in the Maintenance of the Tumorigenic Syndrome

Pollack, Robert; Lo, A.; Steinberg, B.; Smith, K.; Shure, H.; Blanck, G.; Verderame, M.

The end point of the study of viral transformation is a greater understanding of the mechanism of host growth control. At present, this mechanism is totally unknown. Therefore, we are currently left with the task of tabulating the response of the cell to viral tumorigenic transformation. Such work provides a necessary context for any future hypotheses on the mechanism of cellular growth control, since such hypotheses will have to explain these responses. Fortunately, tumorigenic transformation correlates well with a relatively small number of phenotypic changes in the transformed cell. In rat fibroblast lines transformed by SV40, these changes tend to occur coordinately, forming a syndrome (Fig. 1) (Risser and Pollack 1974; Barett and Ts'o 1978; Pollack and Kopelovich 1979; Steinberg et al. 1979).