Deregulation and overexpression of c-fos proto-oncogene in rat renal cell-lines and primary tumors induced by dimethylnitrosamine.

: Rat renal mesenchymal tumors induced by the chemical carcinogen N-dimethylnitrosamine (DMN) and cell-lines derived from kidneys of rats after DMN treatment were found to express abnormal steady state levels of c-fos RNA. This overexpression was not found to arise by gene amplification or rearrangement, but the c-fos gene appeared to be deregulated resulting in increased transcription. The consistent nature of this observation suggests a function for c-fos gene overexpression in tumorigenesis of the rat kidney by DMN.