Proviral activation of the c-myb proto-oncogene is detectable in preleukemic mice infected neonatally with Moloney murine leukemia virus but not in resulting end stage T lymphomas.

Moloney murine leukemia virus induces myeloid leukemia when inoculated intravenously into pristane-primed adult BALB/c mice. One hundred percent of these tumors show insertional activation of the c-myb proto-oncogene, and reverse transcriptase PCR assays have shown that the c-myb activation could be detected soon after infection. We tested BALB/c and NIH Swiss mice that had been inoculated as newborns with Moloney murine leukemia virus, under which conditions they develop T lymphomas exclusively. Reverse transcriptase-PCR assays indicated that c-myb activations were detectable soon after neonatal infection. However, none of the resulting T lymphomas contained c-myb activations. The implications of these results to the timing of proto-oncogene activations in leukemogenesis and the specificity of proto-oncogene activations for different diseases are discussed.