Three New Types of Viral Oncogenes in Defective Avian Leukemia Viruses. II. Biological, Genetic, and Immunochemical Evidence

Abstract

Despite their ubiquity in flocks of the domestic chicken, little work has been done on the molecular biology and genetics of avian leukemia viruses since their first discovery early in this century. Almost all of our knowledge on the molecular mechanism of cell transformation by RNA oncoviruses in the avian system resulted from studies with the extremely rare sarcoma viruses. This has culminated recently in the identification of the src gene and its product, responsible for Rous sarcoma virus (RSV)-induced transformation (Vogt 1977; Brugge and Erikson 1977). The apparent reason for this discrepancy is that for a long time there were no in vitro transformation assay techniques available for leukemia viruses comparable to that developed for RSV in fibroblast cultures in the 1950s by Temin and Rubin (1958). Still today, the majority of avian leukemia viruses (Graf and Beug 1978; see Stéhelin et al., this volume) do not transform in...