ral ssBioMed CentMolecular Cancer Open AcceResearch

Genes that cause cancer have been divided into two general classes – oncogenes that act in a dominant fashion to transform normal cells into a malignant state, and tumor suppressor genes that act in a dominant fashion to prevent such transformation. In this report, we demonstrate that both the v-myb retroviral oncogene, which causes leukemic transformation of hematopoietic cells, and the c-myb proto-oncogene can also function as inhibitors of fibroblast transformation by the v-rel oncogene. These results imply that the myb genes can function either as oncogenes or as tumor suppressors in different cellular contexts. Background The oncogenic transformation of normal cells of verte-brates is a multi-step process in which mutations accumu-late in two classes of cellular genes, oncogenes and tumor suppressor genes [1]. Oncogenes are altered forms of nor-mal cellular proto-oncogenes that act in a dominant fash-ion to convert normal cells into a malignant state. I