Retrovirus-induced insertional mutagenesis: mechanism of collagen mutation in Mov13 mice

The Mov13 mouse strain carries a mutation in the alpha 1(I) procollagen gene which is due to the insertion of a Moloney murine leukemia provirus into the first intron. This insertion results in the de novo methylation of the provirus and flanking DNA, the alteration of chromatin structure, and the transcriptional inactivity of the collagen promoter. To address the mechanism of mutagenesis, we reintroduced a cloned and therefore demethylated version of the Mov13 mutant allele into mouse fibroblasts. The transfected gene was not transcribed, indicating that the transcriptional defect was not due to the hypermethylation. Rather, this result strongly suggests that the mutation is due to the displacement or disruption of cis-acting regulatory DNA sequences within the first intron. We also constructed a Mov13 variant allele containing a single long terminal repeat instead of the whole provirus. This construct also failed to express mRNA, indicating that the Mov13 mutation does not revert by provirus excision as has been observed for other retrovirus-induced mutations.