Environmental Risk and Health Unit, Flemish Institute for Technological Research (VITO), Mol, Belgium.
Faculty of Sciences, Hasselt University, Diepenbeek, Belgium.
Basic Clin Pharmacol Toxicol. 2017 Sep;121 Suppl 3(Suppl Suppl 3):93-101. doi: 10.1111/bcpt.12721. Epub 2017 Feb 10.
Is it not more comfortable to spit saliva in a tube than to be pricked with a needle to draw blood to analyse your health and disease risk? Many patients, study participants and (parents of) young children undoubtedly prefer non-invasive and convenient procedures. Such procedures increase compliance rates especially for longitudinal prospective studies. Saliva is an attractive biofluid providing good quality DNA to study epigenetic mechanisms underlying disease across development. In this MiniReview, we will describe the different applications of saliva in the field of epigenetics, focusing on genomewide methylation analysis. Advantages of the use of saliva and its comparability with blood will be discussed, as will the challenges in data processing and interpretation. Knowledge gaps will be identified and suggestions given on how to improve the analysis, making saliva 'the' biofluid of choice for future biomarker initiatives in many different epidemiological and public health studies.
将唾液吐在管子里是不是比用针刺取血来分析你的健康和疾病风险更舒服？许多患者、研究参与者和（年幼孩子的）父母无疑更喜欢非侵入性和方便的程序。这些程序特别提高了纵向前瞻性研究的顺应率。唾液是一种有吸引力的生物流体，可提供高质量的 DNA，用于研究整个发育过程中疾病背后的表观遗传机制。在这篇 MiniReview 中，我们将描述唾液在表观遗传学领域的不同应用，重点是全基因组甲基化分析。我们将讨论使用唾液的优点及其与血液的可比性，以及数据处理和解释中的挑战。我们将确定知识空白，并就如何改进分析提出建议，使唾液成为未来许多不同的流行病学和公共卫生研究中生物标志物计划的“首选”生物流体。
