Murine myeloid leukemic cells with disrupted myb loci show splicing anomalies that account for heterogeneous sizes in myb proteins.

The ABPL tumor cell lines represent a group of myeloid cell lines which contain an altered myb locus due to viral insertional mutagenesis within the third exon of c-myb. Immunoprecipitation analysis of the proteins produced in three ABPL lines revealed an interesting anomaly. Despite the invariant position of the virus integration event, the three ABPL tumor cell lines we examined (ABPL-1, ABPL-2 and ABPL-4) produced three different sized proteins. In this report, we examined the molecular basis for this protein size heterogeneity. Molecular cloning and sequence analysis of the cDNAs derived from the myb transcripts show that ABPL-1 tumor produces a tripartate mRNA containing sequences derived from the viral gag and env genes fused to the myb coding region. This results in the synthesis of a 74 kd protein. In the ABPL-2 tumor line, a gag-myb fusion protein is produced which is of 68 kd. In ABPL-4 cell line a gag-myb fusion protein is produced which contains an internal deletion of coding sequences derived from exons 13 and 14. This deletion results in the synthesis of a 59 kd protein in ABPL-4 tumor cell line. These observations were further confirmed by RNase protection assays which demonstrate the presence of aberrantly spliced mRNAs in ABPL-1 and ABPL-4 tumor cells but not in cells containing an undisrupted c-myb locus. In vitro translation and immuno-precipitation analysis of the cRNAs derived from the ABPL-1, ABPL-2 and ABPL-4 cDNAs show the synthesis of protein products that were identical to Myb proteins produced by these tumors in vivo. These results suggest that integration of Mo-MuLV within the c-myb locus not only results in deletions of the 5' end of the transcript but splicing aberrations within the encoded mRNA, which results in the synthesis of a heterogeneous array of proteins, not seen in normal hematopoietic cells.