Reconstruction of protein-protein and domain-domain interaction networks of WNT signaling in C. elegans

Abstract

Signaling pathways and gene expression play an important role in living organisms during adult homeostasis. It is important how to behave against the changes in gene expression that is resulted in diseases due to signaling mechanisms, and what kind of approach will be followed. Wnt signaling pathway proteins are the important members of mechanism that occurs in adult homeostasis. However, over-activation of Wnt signaling pathway is resulted in cancer. Nowadays, the information about Wnt signaling pathway is lacking in determining the treatments in cancer. In recent years, new therapeutic methods, like surgical treatments in decreasing the volume of tumor or relations tissues around it, are studied. In the present study, through integration of protein-protein interaction data and Gene Ontology annotations, a novel framework is presented for reconstruction and analysis of a highly-correlated protein interaction network. C. elegans has been chosen to investigate Wnt signaling pathway relate to multi-cellularity. Missing and unknown proteins in Wnt signaling network is aimed to be assigned and at which domains these proteins are connected each other. Thus, inhibitor drug design is aimed on over-activation of β-catenin that causes cancer. Identification of the possible linear pathways in the network enables determining the proteins existing in Wnt signaling pathway in C.elegans. Up to the present very limited interaction information belonging to β-catenin has been reported to the literature so it does not take over in the network. However, the analyses of network shows that protein mig-5 is important in the Wnt signaling pathway.