A. Overall Objectives: 1. To clarify the cellular and molecular mechanisms which determine and regulate hematopoietic and stem cell differentiation. 2. To clarify the relationship between differentiation and malignancy. B. Species Studied: Mice and humans We have been studying the role of nuclear oncogenes in growth and differentiation. Much of our work has focused on c-myb which encodes a nuclear, DNA-binding protein. We find that the major mechanism by which c-myb expression is regulated in mouse hematopoietic cells is modulation of transcription elongation occurring at a site in intron 1. Preliminary results suggest a similar kind of regulation of c-myb in human cells. We have demonstrated that pre-B cell lines express 10-100 times as much c- myb mRNA as more mature B cells. This finding has helped us to demonstrate that pre-B cell lines which begin to express surface immunoglobulin retain a pre-B cell phenotype. In addition, we have established that down-regulation of c-myc mRNA is necessary for mouse erythroleukemia cells to undergo terminal differentiation. Results obtained recently suggest that down-regulation of c-myb mRNA is also necessary for terminal differentiation. These studies suggest that constitutive expression of normal proto-oncogenes may account for the observation that tumor cells are generally """"""""frozen"""""""" in a particular s:ate of differentiation.
