Novel B-cell precursors blocked at the stage of DJH recombination.

Abelson murine leukemia virus-transformed cells have provided the principal model for study of the early events in immunoglobulin gene rearrangements. In this communication, we describe a new type of Abelson virus-transformed pre-B-cell line that is arrested at the DJH stage of the recombination process. These cells differ from other pre-B transformants with respect to two properties associated with the immunoglobulin rearrangement process. First, in contrast to cell lines undergoing VH-to-DJH joining in vitro, none of these cell lines contained detectable levels of RNAs transcribed from their unrearranged VH genes. Second, only some of the cell lines recombined exogenous heptamer-nonamer sequences, indicating that many of them have lost at least a portion of the enzymatic machinery that mediates recombination. The correlation between the absence of unrearranged VH RNAs and the inability to rearrange endogenous immunoglobulin gene segments suggests that VH gene transcription is required both to maintain an active recombination system and for the final step in variable-region formation.