Formal Analysis of the Wnt/beta-catenin Pathway through Statistical Model Checking

The Wnt/beta-catenin signalling pathway plays an important role in the proliferation of neural cells, and hence it is the main focus of several research aimed at understanding neurodegenerative pathologies. In this paper we consider a compact model of the basic mechanisms of the Wnt/beta-catenin pathway and we analyse its dynamics by application of an expressive temporal logic formalism, namely the Hybrid Automata Stochastic Logic. This allows us to formally characterise, and effectively assess, sophisticated aspects of the Wnt/beta-catenin pathway dynamics.