Faculty Bibliography

Because of seronegativity and absence of a leukemic phase in most patients with mycosis fungoides, a role for the human T-lymphotropic virus type I (HTLV-I) in this disease has remained tenuous. Virus particles are not seen in fresh isolates of skin or blood lymphocytes and the malignant cells (Sezary cells) have been difficult to culture. The availability of growth factors and biomolecular techniques have prompted a renewed attempt to find evidence of virus infection in these patients. We report here the successful culture of blood lymphocytes of 17 patients with mycosis fungoides and 1 patient with the Sezary syndrome. The cells of 2 additional patients failed to grow after 4-6 weeks in vitro. Ultrastructural analysis of the cultures showed an abundance of HTLV-like particles in the specimens of 18 of the 20 patients. Preliminary immunohistochemical studies carried out with various antisera directed against HTLV-I and the polymerase chain reaction utilizing a probe for a conserved region of the pol gene of HTLV-I were positive on only a portion of the specimens. Although definitive characterization of this organism awaits further analysis, it seems likely that circulating lymphocytes of all patients with mycosis fungoides harbor a virus that morphologically resembles HTLV-I

A patient with epidermodysplasia verruciformis died of intracranial invasion by squamous cell carcinoma (SCC). A biopsy of clinically normal skin had revealed perineural invasion by malignant keratinocytes. Because SCCs arising in patients with epidermodysplasia verruciformis may be biologically aggressive, it is best to excise them with careful control of the surgical tissue margins

The translation products synthesized in a rabbit reticulocyte lysate system, from total cellular mRNA from the human epithelial cell-line ME-180, have been examined. Keratin proteins are prominent among these translation products, and they precisely coelectrophorese in sodium dodecyl sulfate-polyacrylamide gels with keratins purified from the cells. Type-I, acidic, keratins which are acetylated in vivo, are also acetylated by the reticulocyte lysate. Examination by two-dimensional electrophoresis, of two acidic keratins known to be phosphorylated in vivo reveals that only one of these proteins is phosphorylated in the lysate system. Phosphorylation of this protein occurs after release of the completed polypeptide chain from the ribosome. The protein phosphorylated by the lysate is known to be the only ME-180 phosphokeratin modulated by cyclic AMP, reflecting in vitro the differential modification of ME-180 keratins in vivo

The stable uptake of a bacterial plasmid by mouse or rat cells has been detected following the respective co-transfection of these cells with plasmid in the presence of either Simian virus 40 (SV40) or Polyoma virus DNAs. About 60-70 percent of the resulting SV40-transformed mouse cell clones and about 40 percent of the Polyoma transformed rat cell clones contained plasmid DNA sequences