v-src mutations outside the carboxyl-coding region are not sufficient to fully activate transformation by pp60c-src in NIH 3T3 cells.

Previous studies have shown that carboxyl-terminal mutation of pp60c-src can activate its transforming ability. Conflicting results have been reported for the transforming ability of pp60c-src mutants having only mutations outside its carboxyl-terminal region. To clarify the effects of such mutations, we tested the activities of chimeric v(amino)- and c(carboxyl)-src (v/c-src) proteins at different dosages in NIH 3T3 cells. The focus-forming activity of Rous sarcoma virus long terminal repeat (LTR)-src expression plasmids was significantly reduced when the v-src 3' coding region was replaced with the corresponding c-src region. This difference was masked when the Rous sarcoma virus LTR was replaced with the Moloney murine leukemia virus LTR, which induced approximately 20-fold more protein expression, but even focus-selected lines expressing v/c-src proteins were unable to form large colonies in soft agarose or tumors in NFS mice. This suggests that pp60c-src is not equally sensitive to mutations in its different domains and that there are at least two distinguishable levels of regulation, the dominant one being associated with its carboxyl terminus. v/c-src chimeric proteins expressed with either LTR had high in vitro specific kinase activity equal to that of pp60v-src but, in contrast, were phosphorylated at both Tyr-527 and Tyr-416. Total cell protein phosphotyrosine was enhanced in cells incompletely transformed by v/c-src proteins to the same extent as in v-src-transformed cells, suggesting that the carboxyl-terminal region may affect substrate specificity in a manner that is important for transformation.