Comparison of Saliva Proteins in Healthy and Gingivitis Patients

Human saliva is being considered as an important diagnostic fluid and a potential alternate to blood to detect oral and systemic health status. Saliva that forms the bulk of this fluid is composed of constituents of the salivary glands and biological agents from the systemic circulation.

OBJECTIVE: We are interested in identifying protein biomarkers that could be used to differentiate oral health conditions. The goal of this study was to conduct an untargeted, global proteomics experiment to identify biological markers in unstimulated whole saliva samples from healthy and gingivitis donors.

METHODS: Unstimulated whole saliva from 5 healthy donors and 5 gingivitis donors were collected separately. Each saliva sample was injected twice on a Finnigan LTQ linear ion trap LC MS system, for a total of 20 injections. All injections were performed on the same instrument by the same operator. Sequest and Tandem database search algorithms were used for amino acid sequence identification. Intensity of each peptide of each sample has been quantified. ANOVA is used for statistical analysis.

RESULTS: There were 1267 proteins identified and quantified. Of these 1267 proteins there were 262 proteins identified with high confidence (Priority 1). Of the 262 priority one protein there were no proteins that had a significant change between healthy and diseased groups although some proteins are directionally different in quantity.

Conclusion: The study sugegsted that teher is a clear difference from the sample collected from health and disease subject. A larger study should be considered to further determine the statistical difference.