Vinyl chloride is a potent hepatocarcinogen which reacts with DNA to generate etheno bases. In order to determine whether mutational patterns in target genes in vivo are characteristic of vinyl chloride and could be explained by the mutagenic properties of the etheno bases, human and rat liver tumours associated with exposure to vinyl chloride were analysed for point mutations in the ras and p53 genes. In this paper, we review these data and report our latest results on animal tumours. Two alterations were found which could be attributed to a direct effect of vinyl chloride: a GC-->AT transition which leads to a GGC-->GAC mutation at codon 13 of the Ki-ras gene in human liver angiosarcomas, and lesions at AT base pairs, mostly AT-->TA transversions, which lead to mutations in the p53 gene in human and rat angiosarcomas and to a CAA-->CTA mutation at codon 61 of the Ha-ras gene in rat hepatocellular carcinomas.