Positive and negative controls on cell growth.
Positive and negative controls on cell growth.
复制标题
细胞生长的阳性和阴性对照。
DOI:
10.1021/bi00447a001
复制
发表时间:
1989
期刊:
影响因子:
2.9
通讯作者:
Weinberg,RA
中科院分区:
文献类型:
--
作者:
Weinberg,RA
Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research, Nine Cambridge Center, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02142, and Department of Biology, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139 Received May 15, 1989; Revised Manuscript Received June 12, 1989 e oncogenes that have attracted great attention over the past decade would seem to provide us with much of the ex-planation at the molecular level of the origins of cancer. We now count as many as 50 distinct cellular oncogenes, many of which are able to induce at least some of the cell phenotypes associated with the neoplastic state. Of these, about a dozen are directly implicated in the etiology of human cancer. The remainder have been found associated with a variety of mammalian and avian retroviruses, having been abstracted from the cellular genome by these transducing viruses. Yet others in this large group have been uncovered by virtue of nucleic acid homologies with previously known oncogenes (Bishop, 1983; Varmus, 1984). Taken together, these genes leave an impression of a richly complex cellular growth reg-ulatory circuitry that can be perturbed at many points by the actions of oncogenes and their encoded proteins. In spite of this already well-documented complexity, there are reasons to believe that oncogenes can provide at best only part of the explanation of the molecular and genetic mechanisms of cancer. These reasons stem from two attributes that are shared by all these genes. First, oncogenes actin one way or another as positive effectors of cell growth. As such, the oncogene paradigm overlooks the possible existence of an equally complex and important cellular growth regulatory network that is dedicated to suppressing or constraining cell growth. Such negative regulatory genes, to the extent that they exist, could become involved in cancer when they are lost or inactivated; such loss would remove a normally existing brake or constraint on the cell’s growth, thereby triggering the runaway growth of neoplasia. Second, oncogenes invariably arise as consequences of so-matic alterations of the target cell genome. Thus, in human tumors, the cellular oncogenes studied have been found to arise as a consequence of well-defined somatic mutations of normal tSome of the work described here was supported by Outstanding Investigator Grant 5-R35-CA39826 of the National Cancer Institute and by American Cancer Society Grant CD355 to RAW, who is an Am-erican Cancer Research Professor.