期刊名称：Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
印刷版ISSN：0027-8424
电子版ISSN：1091-6490
出版年度：2015
卷号：112
期号：26
页码：7877-7882
DOI：10.1073/pnas.1508223112
语种：English
出版社：The National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
摘要：In the middle of the 20th century, animal tumor viruses were heralded as possible models for understanding human cancer. By the mid-1970s, the molecular basis by which tumor viruses transform cells into a malignant state was beginning to emerge as the first viral genomic sequences were reported and the proteins encoded by their transforming genes were identified and characterized. This was a time of great excitement and rapid progress. In 1978, prompted by the discovery from Ray Erikson's group that the Rous sarcoma virus (RSV) v-Src-transforming protein had an associated protein kinase activity specific for threonine, my group at the Salk Institute set out to determine whether the polyomavirus middle T-transforming protein had a similar kinase activity. Here, I describe the experiments that led to the identification of a kinase activity associated with middle T antigen and our serendipitous discovery that this activity was specific for tyrosine in vitro, and how this in turn led to the fortuitous observation that the v-Src-associated kinase activity was also specific for tyrosine. Our finding that v-Src increased the level of phosphotyrosine in cellular proteins in RSV-transformed cells confirmed that v-Src is a tyrosine kinase and transforms cells by phosphorylating proteins on tyrosine. My colleague Bart Sefton and I reported these findings in the March issue of PNAS in 1980. Remarkably, all of the experiments in this paper were accomplished in less than one month.
