Abstract
The ability of viruses to produce malignant disease in humans has been intensively studied in recent years. One of these candidate viruses is the Epstein-Barr virus (EBV). The EBV is the causative agent of infectious mononucleosis (IM), and is associated with African Burkitt’s lymphoma and nasopharyngeal carcinoma (NPC). The EBV can transform human and certain non-human primate B-lympho-cytes in vitro. Understanding the biological properties of EBV may be important to the understanding of tumor induction. The use of EBV-specific monoclonal antibodies (mAb)s to study the nature of EBV proteins is one way to examine the mechanism underlying the biological properties of the virus (1).