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Published July 1978 | public
Journal Article

High frequency of aberrant expression of moloney murine leukemia virus in clonal infections

Abstract

Clones of cells were isolated from single virus-single cell infections of NIH/3T3 cells with Moloney murine leukemia virus. Approximately one third of such clones aberrantly expressed viral gene functions. One clone produced virus with altered plaque morphology, while others failed to produce particles able to make plaques on XC cells. In addition, clones that made particles lacking reverse transcriptase were found, and these did not synthesize the reverse transcriptase precursor Pr180^(gag-pol). One clone (M23) lacked any detectable glycoprotein or reverse transcriptase. Despite these defects, each clone released particles of type C morphology, suggesting that gag gene function alone may be sufficient for particle production. All the particles contained viral RNA of 60–70S that was composed of the normal 35S size subunits except for M23, which had a deletion in the viral genome of approximately 1000–1500 nucleotides. A variety of defective clones were also isolated following infection of rat cells with Moloney virus. It is apparent that the murine leukemia virus genome is often mutated by spontaneous processes generating a wide range of phenotypes.

Additional Information

© 1978 by MIT. Received 28 March 1978, Revised 26 April 1978, Available online 26 April 2004. We thank Christopher Riser for performing the electron microscopy. This work was supported by grants from the National Cancer Institute and the American Cancer Society. O.N.W. is a postdoctoral fellow of the Helen Hay Whitney Foundation. D.B. is a research professor of the American Cancer Society. The costs of publication of this article were defrayed in part by the payment of page charges. This article must therefore be hereby marked "advertisement" in accordance with 18 U.S.C. Section 1734 solely to indicate this fact.

Additional details

Created:
August 19, 2023
Modified:
October 24, 2023