Biologic properties of viable deletion mutants of simian virus 40 (SV40) rescued from the cells of an SV40-induced hamster lymphocytic leukemia.

A lymphocytic leukemia induced by the oncogenic DNA simian virus 40 (SV40) in an inbred LSH/SsLak Syrian golden hamster was evoked to produce infectious SV40 by fusion of the leukemia cells with grivet monkey kidney (GMK) cells and by exposure of the leukemia cells to the chemical inducers mitomycin C and cycloheximide. Plaque-purified viable substrains of the rescued SV40 when studied by restriction endonuclease digestion of viral DNA were found to contain small deletions within the Hind III restriction fragment C. These deletions lay near the viral origin of DNA replication. Ten plaque-purified substrains of the rescued virus identified by immunofluorescence as being SV40 were found, when compared to the wild-type SV40, to replicate slowly and to form small plaques. Although these substrains transformed NIH/3T3 cells as efficiently as the wild-type SV40 in tissue culture, they were generally less oncogenic in vivo--7 of the 10 failed to induce tumors. The 3 oncogenic SV40-rescued substrains were not found to exhibit "lymphocytotropism," i.e., the capacity to infect and neoplastically transform preferentially hamster lymphocytes. Thus the hamster lymphocytic leukemia originally induced by the wild-type SV40 was most likely a chance-stochastic event rather than the result of tropism-determinism mediated by the virus, as is usually the case with leukemogenic RNA viruses.