In cancer, Wnt/beta-catenin signaling is ubiquitously referred to as an "oncogenic" pathway that promotes tumor progression. This review examines how the regulation and downstream effects of Wnt/beta-catenin signaling in cancer varies depending on cellular context, with a focus on malignant melanoma. We emphasize that the cellular homeostasis of Wnt/beta-catenin signaling may represent a more a...

Migration of neural crest cells is an elaborate process that requires the delamination of cells from an epithelium and cell movement into an extracellular matrix. In this work, it is shown for the first time that the non-canonical Wnt signalling [planar cell polarity (PCP) or Wnt-Ca2+] pathway controls migration of neural crest cells. By using specific Dsh mutants, we show that the canonical Wn...

Wnt ligand expression and activation of the Wnt/b-catenin pathway have been associated with pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma, but whether Wnt activity is required for the development of pancreatic cancer has remained unclear. Here, we report the results of three different approaches to inhibit the Wnt/b-catenin pathway in a established transgenic mousemodel of pancreatic cancer. First, we found...

How cells integrate the input of multiple polarizing signals during division is poorly understood. We demonstrate that two distinct Caenorhabditis elegans Wnt pathways contribute to the polarization of the ABar blastomere by differentially regulating its duplicated centrosomes. Contact with the C blastomere orients the ABar spindle through a nontranscriptional Wnt spindle alignment pathway, whi...

Long non-coding RNAs (lncRNAs) are non-protein-coding transcripts in the human genome which perform crucial functions in diverse biological processes. The abnormal expression of some lncRNAs has been found in tumorigenesis, development and therapy resistance of cancers. They may act as oncogenes or tumour suppressors and can be used as diagnostic or prognostic markers, prompting their therapeut...

Anaberrant Wnt/β-catenin signaling pathway is frequently implicated in tumorigenesis. However, whether the Wnt/β‑catenin pathway plays a role in resistance to antitumor chemotherapy drugs remains unknown. In the present study, the process of autophagy was assessed following overexpression of the autophagy‑associated gene Beclin 1 in gemcitabine‑induced MG63 human osteosarcoma cells. Autophagy‑a...

Similarly to the Wnt protein palmitoyltransferase, porcupine (PPN) is essential to the activation of the Wnt/β-catenin signaling pathway. However, little is known about the role of PPN activity in human gastric cancer, one of the most common causes of cancer-related mortality. Real-time quantitative PCR was used to detect the expression levels of PPN in paired gastric cancer tissues. Cell proli...

The long non-coding RNAs (lncRNAs) regulating encoding transcripts/genes involved in Wnt signalling pathway in keloids is largely unclear. We used a pathway-focused lncRNA microarray to detect the differentiated expression profiles of both lncRNAs and genes involved in Wnt pathway, thus a total of 116 Wnt-targeted genes and 69 Wnt-related lncRNAs aberrantly expressed in keloids were initially i...

We read with great interest the article by Stewart (1) in the December issue of the Journal. The author gives a useful update of genomic alterations affecting Wnt signaling components that are frequently observed in non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) and reminds us that Wnt component mutations seen in other cancers such as colon are uncommon in NSCLC. We believe it is necessary to bring further...