The Role of Cell Surface Changes in RNA Tumor Virus-transformed Cells

Abstract

There are two basic ways of investigating the transformation of cells by viruses: one possibility is to search for viral transforming genes using a genetic approach; the other is to look for such gene products with a view toward understanding functions. Neither of these lines of research has yet led to a final conclusion about the number or size of either transforming genes or gene products. At the present stage we are mainly concerned with cataloging phenotypic differences between normal and transformed cells, with special attention to whether such differences can be shown to be linked in their expression or whether they are independently expressed. One or several such differences are obviously reflected in metabolic and structural changes on the tumor cell surface, which is believed to play a decisive role in the regulation of cell growth. Biochemical analyses have revealed changes in the glycolipid and glycoprotein patterns when tumor...