Abstract
BackgroundWnt signal transduction pathway (Wnt STP) is a crucial intracellular pathway mainly due to its participation in important biological processes, functions, and diseases, i.e., embryonic development, stem-cell management, and human cancers among others. This is why Wnt STP is one of the highest researched signal transduction pathways. Study and analysis of its origin, expansion and gradual development to the present state as found in humans is one aspect of Wnt research. The pattern of development and evolution of the Wnt STP among various species is not clear till date. A phylogenetic tree created from Wnt STPs of multiple species may address this issue.ResultsIn this respect, we construct a phylogenetic tree from modules of Wnt STPs of diverse species. We term it as the ‘Module Tree’. A module is nothing but a self-sufficient minimally-dependent subset of the original Wnt STP. Authenticity of the module tree is tested by comparing it with the two reference trees.ConclusionsThe module tree performs better than an alternative phylogenetic tree constructed from pathway topology of Wnt STPs. Moreover, an evolutionary emergence pattern of the Wnt gene family is created and the module tree is tallied with it to showcase the significant resemblances.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s12918-016-0299-7) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.
Highlights
Wnt signal transduction pathway (Wnt STP) is a crucial intracellular pathway mainly due to its participation in important biological processes, functions, and diseases, i.e., embryonic development, stem-cell management, and human cancers among others
Here we describe the methodology (Fig. 1) involved in creating phylogenetic trees from species specific Wnt STPs, taxonomy information from NCBI and 18S rRNA sequences
When the module tree is compared with this emerging pattern of Wnt gene family evolution (Fig. 6), we have found that most of the chordates were placed in vicinity of each other, except a few
Summary
Wnt signal transduction pathway (Wnt STP) is a crucial intracellular pathway mainly due to its participation in important biological processes, functions, and diseases, i.e., embryonic development, stem-cell management, and human cancers among others. This is why Wnt STP is one of the highest researched signal transduction pathways. Results: In this respect, we construct a phylogenetic tree from modules of Wnt STPs of diverse species. These distances among a set of species can be utilized to construct a phylogenetic tree namely the “Module Tree” [20]
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