View source

For many decades, researchers have known that saliva is important for chewing, tasting, swallowing, and as the first step in digestion. A multitude of proteins and other molecules present in saliva also play vital roles in control of viral and bacterial functions in the context of health and disease.


'''Human Salivary Proteome Project'''

New evidence improved our understanding of salivary contributions to human health. In March 2008, an NIDCR-supported team of biologists, chemists, engineers and computer scientists at five research institutions across the country mapped the salivary proteome, or "dictionary," of proteins present in human saliva. Representing saliva samples from two dozen women and men of various ethnic backgrounds, the saliva catalog contains over a thousand proteins. Over half of the proteins in saliva were also present in blood, and nearly one quarter were the same as those in tears. To learn more about the project, please read [[PubMed:18361515|this seminal paper]].

This work was supported mainly by U.S. Public Health Service Grants R01 DE016937-16 (Parent Grant PI: Floyd Dewhirst, Forsyth; Supplement Consortium PI: Marcelo Freire, JCVI) from the National Institutes of Health/National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research.

'''A Community-based Web Portal'''

The experimental data from the project as well as information from popular knowledge bases such as UniProt and PubMed are now available online in the Human Salivary Proteome Wiki (HSPW).  A group of scientists have evolved from one study to multi-center analysis of various datasets to develop the [https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/00220345211014432?journalCode=jdrb HSPW].  Saliva tests based on these biomarkers offer many advantages over blood tests that require a needle stick and can pose contamination risks from blood-borne diseases. However, much effort is still required to enrich and refine the salivary ontology and functions. 

The HSPW committee members are recognized researchers in the oral biology community. They are tasked to develop curation guidelines, review annotations submitted by the community, and promote the wiki. Click [[Project:CurrentTeam|here]] to see who they are.

To improve our efforts to a functional era of big data, our team has joined the team from [http://www.homd.org HOMD] . We aim to integrate our datasets and bring our human derived data with microbial derived information. This will provide our teams with new knowledge of how and why complex host-microbial interactions govern health and disease.

Thank you for your participation!