Salivary omics

Cova, Marta Alexandra Mendonça Nóbrega;Castagnola, Massimo;MESSANA, IRENE;CABRAS, TIZIANA;Ferreira, Rita Maria Pinho;Amado, Francisco Manuel Lemos;Vitorino, Rui Miguel Pinheiro

2015-01-01

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Abstract

Salivary diagnostics has become an attractive research fi eld to assess physiological and pathological states from prognosis, condition onset, and diagnosis to monitoring and therapeutic outcomes. Saliva, as a diagnostic biofl uid, besides being a noninvasive method, offers a costeffective approach to healthcare providers and also can be used for the screening of large populations. The advancements and discovery of high- throughput techniques for the identifi cation and quantifi cation of several types of biomarkers, including salivary DNA, RNA, proteins, and metabolites, were essential for salivary diagnostics development. In this review we explored the biomedical applications of saliva summarizing the salivary candidate biomarkers found using genomic, transcriptomic, and proteomic approaches for oral and systemic diseases. Despite all achievements obtained so far using saliva as diagnostic fl uid, which strengthen its position as an alternative diagnostic fl uid, a cooperative effort must be performed in the next decade in order to optimize and standardize the methodological protocols and validate the potential salivary biomarkers through long-term longitudinal and cohort studies in large-scale population.