A signalling pathway is a cascade of reactions carried out together by a
group of molecules in a system to bring out the metabolic functions starting with cell
division to cell death. When signalling pathways interact with one another, they form
networks, which allow cellular responses to be coordinated, often by combinatorial
signalling events. Any abnormal change affecting the activation or deactivation of such
signalling events leads to the abnormal physiological cellular functions. The
understanding of the molecular mechanism of signalling pathways is beneficial to
understand the pathological scenery and treatment. Recent advancements in
computational methods have given a new insight to understand the molecular
mechanism involved in signalling pathways. The use of systemic and computational
tools is crucial in systems biology as the complexity of the biological system is more, a
vast amount of data is being generated and the scattered pieces of information has to be
integrated into a meaningful order. The present chapter deals with the utilization of
systems biology tools, and data mining techniques to understand the molecular
mechanism of ‘Wnt signalling pathway; an intercellular pathway which regulates
critical aspects of cell fate determination, cell migration, cell polarity, neural patterning
and organogenesis during embryonic development’, with the integrated software
platforms, which could help to address the future research problems in biology and
medicine.
Keywords: Axin, Cancer, β-catenin, GSK-3β, Network analysis, Pathway
prediction, Systems biology, Tankyrase, Therapeutics, Wnt signalling pathway,
Wnt ligands, Wnt protein.
