Activation-induced cytidine deaminase (AID), which is essential to both class switch recombination and somatic hypermutation of the Ig gene, is expressed in many types of human B cell lymphoma/ leukemia. AID is a potent mutator because it is involved in DNA breakage not only of Ig but also of other genes, including protooncogenes. Recent studies suggest that AID is required for chromosomal translocation involving cmyc and Ig loci. However, it is unclear whether AID plays other roles in tumorigenesis. We examined the effect of AID deficiency on the generation of surface Ig-positive B cell lymphomas in Emu-cmyc transgenic mice. Almost all lymphomas that developed in AID-deficient transgenic mice were pre-B cell lymphomas, whereas control transgenic mice had predominantly B cell lymphomas, indicating that AID is required for development of B but not pre-B cell lymphomas from cmyc overexpressing tumor progenitors. Thus, AID may play multiple roles in B cell lymphomagenesis.somatic hypermutation ͉ Pim1 ͉ secondary hit ͉ clonal expansion S omatic hypermutation (SHM) originally was considered to take place specifically in the IgV genes (1). Subsequently, several genes other than those encoding Igs were shown to be targets of SHM in activated B cells and human B cell lymphomas. Such target genes include MYC, IG alpha, PAX5, BCL6, and PIM1 (2-4). Activation-induced cytidine deaminase (AID) has been shown to be essential for SHM, gene conversion, and class switch recombination (CSR), three types of genetic alteration induced by antigen stimulation of B lymphocytes (5-9).Original studies on human lymphomas indicated that AID is expressed in B cell lymphomas of germinal center (GC) origin, such as diffuse large B cell lymphoma, Burkitt's lymphoma, and follicular lymphoma, where AID is expressed physiologically (3, 10, 11). However, more recent analyses have extended AID expression to other types of human B cell lymphoma, including chronic lymphocytic leukemia, Hodgkin's lymphoma, mantle cell lymphoma, mucosa-associated lymphoid tissue lymphoma, mediastinal B cell lymphoma, hairy cell leukemia, and acute lymphocytic leukemia (12-16). The results of these studies suggest that AID may be involved in the pathogenesis of human B cell malignancy, including not only GC-derived B cell lymphoma but also almost all other types of human B cell lymphoma.Studies on AID transgenic (Tg) animals have revealed that all individual mice develop T cell lymphomas in which genes for non-Igs such as T cell receptor (tcr), cmyc, pim1, cd4, and cd5 accumulate massive mutations in the region 3Ј proximal to each promoter (17, 18). The AID Tg mice also develop B cell lymphoma, albeit much less frequently (I-m.O. and T.H., unpublished data). Studies also report AID to be essential for the mouse chromosomal translocation T(12;15), which corresponds to the human chromosomal translocation t(8;14), the hallmark of endemic Burkitt's lymphoma, in IL-6 Tg mice (19,20). However, these animals did not develop plasmacytoma; instead, they developed polyclonal ade...