Oral Health care and Understanding what our Saliva can tell us.
Saliva contains an abundance of proteins that could be used to screen for diseases, particularly oral diseases. Until now, though, studies have only focused on the small subset of free-floating saliva proteins. Far more proteins are present inside of oral cells, and Timothy Griffin, Nelson Rhodus and colleagues developed a method, called three-step peptide fractionation, to look at those understudied proteins.
Researchers have developed a novel technique to separate and analyze all the proteins found in human saliva, not just the soluble ones, providing an approach that may reveal protein markers for oral cancer and other disorders in the oral cavity. Source ScienceDaily (Mar. 10, 2008)