Cellular control of ras oncogene action

Significant progress has been made in the past several years with the application of the concepts and technology of molecular biology in studying specific genes and gene regulatory functions related to cancers. In particular, the finding of certain transforming human cancer genes being the homologs of oncogenes transduced in acute transforming retroviruses has opened up a new area for molecular genetic study of environmental carcinogenesis, including that caused by radiation. Since carcinogenesis is generally thought to be a multi-factor/multi-step process, it is possible that alteration of an oncogene may represent one important step while other genetic factors may also be involved in the carcinogenesis process. Here they briefly describe their studies to implicate the existence of genetic factor(s) that inhibit the oncogenic action of mutated ras oncogenes and also to demonstrate how this may be exploited for investigating the mechanism of carcinogenesis