The papillomaviruses have been studied intensively over the past several years because of their ability to induce tumors in animals and because of the strong association between human papillomavirus (HPV) infection and some human carcinomas. Despite numerous attempts, it has not been possible to propagate the infectious papillomavirus particles in cultured cells. Nonetheless, the papillomaviruses can exert profound effects on cell morphology and growth properties. This is first demonstrated for the fibropapillomaviruses, in particular bovine papillomavirus type I (BPVI), which can efficiently induce morphologic and tumorigenic transformation of cultured fibroblasts. It has proved more difficult to demonstrate similar activity for the papillomaviruses such as the HPV or the cottontail rabbit papillomavirus that cause purely epithelial lesions. Despite the progress made in identifying biological responses to the papillomavirus-transforming genes in cultured cells, a better understanding of papillomavirus-induced tumorigenesis awaits a molecular description of the biochemical events underlying these complex phenotypes. The development of transient expression systems that rapidly generate homogeneous population of cells responding to viral gene products should facilitate this analysis.
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Daniel DiMaio (1991) studied this question.