Francis Peyton Rous was credited with being the first to come up with the idea that viruses could cause cancer. In 1911 he performed an experiment where he removed a type of tumor called a fibrosarcoma from chickens, ground them up, and used centrifugation to remove cells and debris. He injected the remaining liquid into healthy chicks and found that the chicks developed sarcomas. The causative agent in the liquid was later found to be a virus that was called the Rous sarcoma virus (RSV).
Later work by others showed that RSV was a type of retrovirus. Non-cancer-forming retroviruses contain 3 genes, called gag, pol, and env. Some tumor-inducing retroviruses (such as RSV), however, contain a gene called v-src. It was found that the v-src gene in RSV is required for the formation of cancer and that the other genes have no role in oncogenesis.
c-src
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| colspan="2" bgcolor="#dddddd" | Identifiers
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| bgcolor="#e7dcc3" | Symbol(s)
| bgcolor="#eeeeee" | [SRC]
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| bgcolor="#e7dcc3" | Entrez
| bgcolor="#eeeeee" | [6714]
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| bgcolor="#e7dcc3" | OMIM
| bgcolor="#eeeeee" | [190090]
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In 1977, J. Michael Bishop and Harold E. Varmus discovered that normal chickens contain a gene that is structurally closely-related to v-src. The normal cellular gene was called c-src. This discovery changed the current thinking about cancer from a model wherein cancer is caused by a foreign substance (a viral gene) to one where a gene that is normally present in the cell can cause cancer. It is believed that at one point an ancestral virus mistakenly incorporated the c-src gene of its cellular host. At some point, the normal gene became mutated into an abnormally-functioning oncogene, as is now observed in RSV. Once the oncogene is transfected back into a normal host, it can lead to cancer.
src: The transforming (sarcoma inducing) gene of Rous sarcoma virus. The protein product is pp60vsrc, a cytoplasmic protein with tyrosine-specific protein kinase activity (EC [2.7.10.2]), that associates with the cytoplasmic face of the plasma membrane. The protein consists for 3 domains, an N-terminal SH3 domain, a central SH2 domain and a Tyrosine kinase domain.
Src tyrosine kinases transmit integrin-dependent signals central to cell movement and proliferation.
