Regulation of a Collagen Gene Promoter by the Product of Viral Mos Oncogene

Oncogenic transformation of cells produces important changes in the biosynthetic pattern of certain cellular proteins. For example, the synthesis of type I collagen in transformed fibroblasts is severely reduced as a result of changes in transcription. Here we report the results of DNA-mediated transfection experiments using recombinant plasmids in which the promoter region of the alpha 2(I) collagen gene is fused to an easily recognizable marker gene, and cell lines expressing the marker gene are isolated. Our data show that the expression of the marker gene fused to the cloned alpha 2(I) collagen promoter is strongly inhibited by v-mos transformation, suggesting that a common mechanism inhibits both the transfected and endogeneous alpha 2(I) collagen promoters.