Bioinformatics advances in saliva diagnostics

Abstract

A knowledge base to retrieve, integrate and analyze multiple data types collected from saliva samples promises to transform healthcare. Saliva is ideally suited to non-invasive detection and monitoring of disease. However, the absence of a free resource that cross-references disease-based changes in the levels of biomolecules has hamstrung progress in identifying biomarkers of specific illnesses. To address this issue, a team led by Ji-Ye Ai and David Wong at the University of California in Los Angeles are spearheading the creation of the Salivaomics Knowledge Base (SKB), a data management system and web resource to facilitate the discovery of saliva biomarkers using systems biology. The researchers first defined a common and structured vocabulary to describe the diverse data types; now, they are creating a common interface to integrate protein, RNA and metabolite data from multiple independent databases.

Keywords

BioMart / database / ontology / saliva

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