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Oncogenes

The weakest link?

Nature Reviews Molecular Cell Biology volume 2, page 640 (2001)Cite this article

The authors initially compared the level of viral infection in untransformed NIH-3T3 cells with that in cells transformed with oncogenes that activate the Ras pathway — v-erbB, sos and ras. Only transformed cells show significant morphological changes related to infection, such as cell rounding and clumping, and high levels of viral protein synthesis and viral progeny. Interestingly, this was specific to the Ras pathway and was not a general feature of the transformed phenotype, as cells transformed with c-myc did not have an increase in viral output. The demonstration that inhibitors of Ras and Mek1/2 — a downstream effector in the Erk pathway — prevented this increase in infection by HSV-1 further proved that an activated Ras pathway is important for infection.

As Ras is a key regulator of several signalling pathways, Ras effector mutants that activate just one pathway — Raf/Erk, phosphatidylinositol 3-kinase and RALGDS — were used to see which pathway was involved in permissiveness to infection. The authors showed that activation of the Raf/Erk pathway was the only one that markedly increased susceptibility to HSV-1.

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ORIGINAL RESEARCH PAPER

  1. Farassati, F. et al. Oncogenes in Ras signalling pathway dictate host-cell permissiveness to herpes simplex virus 1. Nature Cell Biol. 3, 745–750 (2001) http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=11483960&dopt=Abstract

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  1. Associate Editor, Nature Reviews Cancer,

    Emma Greenwood

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  1. Emma Greenwood
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Greenwood, E. The weakest link?. Nat Rev Mol Cell Biol 2, 640 (2001). https://doi.org/10.1038/35089536

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