Use Of Temperature Sensitive Mutants To Map Reovirus Induced Oncolysis

Reovirus is known to establish persistent infections in normal cells while selectively destroying transformed cells. Individual viruses from each of the ten groups of Reovirus temperature sensitive mutants were used to examine the gene or genes involved in the differential lysis activity. Ts mutants have one of the ten genes impaired when growing at the non-permissive temperature, while they behave like wild type when growing at the permissive temperature. Normal cells and their transformed cells counterpart were used in this study: L929, WI-38, WI-38 VA132RA, T1, N1, and MYC-3. Reovirus maintains a persistent infection in normal cell lines, but lyses the transformed cell lines. However, the tsE did not lyse the T1 and Myc3 cells while tsG did not lyse the Myc3 cells. The tsE and tsG have their gene lesion in S3 and S4 genes respectively, which demonstrated that σNS and σ3 are involved in the differential lysis activities.