ABSTRACT
Human cytomegalovirus (CMV) is a species-specific agent, which can cause infections without visible symptoms or produce severe, occasionally fatal disease. Patients with clinical CMV infection developed growth retardation, cardiovascular anomalies, structural abnormalities in the derivatives of the first embryonic arch, and deafness. Human CMV can enhance host cell DNA and RNA synthesis, a property associated with known oncogenic DNA viruses. The oncogenicity of transformed cells increases during in vitro passages, and is inversely related to the rate of expression of CMV-related antigens in the cell population. CMV has been isolated from leukocytes of babies suffering from congenital infection and also has been detected by cocultivation with human embryo fibroblasts in 22% of the mononuclear cell fractions and 28% of the polymorphonuclear fractions of immunosuppressed patients. With increasing passage levels, the percentage of CMV-transformed cells expressing virus-related antigens usually decreased.
