Association of microtubules and intermediate filaments in normal fibroblasts and its disruption upon transformation by a temperature-sensitive mutant of Rous sarcoma virus.

By double indirect immunofluorescence, using primary rabbit antibodies to tubulin and guinea pig antibodies to vimentin, we have simultaneously labeled microtubules and intermediate filaments in several types of cultured normal fibroblasts. With well-spread interphase cells there was an extensive but not complete correspondence of the labeling patterns for the two filamentous structures out to the cell periphery. This correspondence existed both at a gross level, where parallel but not coincident arrays of thickly labeled strands of the two types of filaments were observed, and at a fine level, where thinly labeled strands of the two were superimposed. The results suggest that there may be some type(s) of molecular linkages between microtubules and vimentin intermediate filaments that is under metabolic control. With NRK fibroblasts infected with a temperature-sensitive mutant (LA23) of Rous sarcoma virus, cells grown at the nonpermissive temperature (39 degrees C) showed the correspondence of the distributions of the microtubules and intermediate filaments characteristic of the normal phenotype but within 1 hr after a shift to the permissive temperature (33 degrees C) there was an extensive retraction of the intermediate filaments around the cell nucleus whereas the microtubules remained dispersed into the cell periphery. These results suggest that one of the functions carried out by p60src, the protein kinase responsible for transformation by Rous sarcoma virus, may be to modify the component(s) involved in the putative linkages between microtubules and intermediate filaments in the normal cells.