MYC and neoplasm: Viruses change the central carbon metabolism of the infected host cells (Figure 3), sometimes in a similar way as observed in many tumor cells (Figures 2, 4), i.e., by the permanent activation of cellular (proto)-oncogenes (e.g., Myc), the inactivation of tumor suppressors (e.g., p53) or by the introduction of virus-specific oncogenes as in case of certain tumor DNA viruses (e.g., large and small T antigens of simian virus 40, SV40) (Tables 1, 2) (Heaton and Randall, 2011b; Goodwin et al., 2015; Sanchez and Lagunoff, 2015; Levy and Bartosch, 2016; Mushtaq et al., 2016).