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Researchers Create a Protein Map of Human Spit
Ant writes "United States researchers have identified all 1,116 unique proteins found in human saliva glands. It was a discovery they said on Tuesday that could usher in a wave of convenient, spit-based diagnostic tests that could be done without the need for a single drop of blood. As many as 20 percent of the proteins found in saliva are also found in blood, said Fred Hagen, a researcher at the University of Rochester Medical Center in New York who worked on the study."
dot dot dot
in Singapore. Damn shame...
"Freedom in the USA is not the ability to do what you want. It is the ability to stop others from doing what THEY want"
punch them in the mouth a few times.
i call dibs on the patent to beating patients as a diagnostic tool.
anyone want to participate in clinical trials?
I read it as "Researchers Create a Protein Map of Human Spirit." Much more interesting that way.
correctly?
Yeah, I know, Slashdot == no girlfriend. Save your reply.
build this diagnostic into paving slabs and fit it in the far East and you could test 98% of the population in a couple of hours I reckon. Seriously, what is it with spitting in the street out there? Yeah, yeah - kinda off topic.
but after rtfa, I must say it is pretty cool. The spit based tests would make the trip to hospitals whole lot less stressful. However what is not mentioned is reliability of these tests, or mainly how many false positives it gives for let's say breast cancer. If 100% of women with breast cancer have a certain protein, but also 60% of women who don't have breast cancer have that same protein, it makes the test...well less effective.
I grew up in Rochester and he was my next door neighbor!
Go him!
What is "As many as 20 percent of the proteins are found in saliva are also found in blood[...]" supposed to mean?
Will that start drinking spit
Reads TFA...
Never Mind..
They collected saliva from a whopping 23 people to come up with this wonder list of proteins. Ever heard of genetic variation? dot dot dot seems appropriate...
"Researchers in the United States announced Tuesday that they have identified all 1,116 unique proteins found in human saliva glands. The discovery could usher in a wave of convenient, spit-based diagnostic tests that could be done without the need for a single drop of blood. Fred Hagen, a researcher at the University of Rochester Medical Center in New York who worked on the study, said that as many as 20 percent of the proteins found in saliva are also found in blood."
Not perfect, but much more readable, would you not agree?
(Coincidentally, the fortune at the bottom of the submit page reads, "Drawing on my fine command of language, I said nothing." I find that more than a little strange...)
Man, it's hard enough to fill those little cups with urine, but now they want a cup full of spit? They'd better have a good, stimulating magazine to help with that, like Texas Chili Monthly.
Would that come under biology or ornithology?
29 mpg. YMMV.
Oh, sure, that's what they told the funding bodies, but let's be honest: they did this research simply so they could publish papers with titles like "A Comprehensive Analysis of Spit."
We live, as we dream -- alone....
Just thought I would point out some techniques that can quickly(?) tell you a great deal about the quantities of various proteins, iTRAQ is one: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITRAQ. So an effective assay might look at the ratios of dozens of proteins and their relative abundance, not that iTRAQ is scalable for regular clinical tests. It is quite expensive as kits. On the other hand if twenty proteins seem to be key indicators of cancer a protocol using antibodies for each to partially purify the proteins followed by iTRAQ and MALDI mass spectrometry http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maldi could be reasonably cost effective. It depends on how remarkable the differences are between well:sick people. A simple elisa test is all you need is a yes/no question on if a protein is there. The next step is just looking for good correlations between people having diseases and changes from the "fingerprint" of what is normal, it seems quite promising.
My brother, who works in a museum restoring old wooden objects, sometimes uses spit to remove stains. he smiles and says: this needs an enzymatic clean... spit...rub... gone. Does this research mean that some chemical company can now manufacture and sell this stuff? Superfluous nonsense. Spit is brilliant, also excellent for wiping spectacles, and to remove stains from clothes.
is to clone spit so we might finally have a cure for dry mouth. The makers of Gatoraide have called this Frankenscience and tampering with the natural order of things. They've sponsored a bill called "Ban Dolly's Spit". "Where will it end" said a spokesman for the company? "Are we gonna clone sweat next?"
"Hey dude have you got a map?" *gets a wad shot at her* "Ewww! What the hell was that for?!"
"well you didn't say what kind of map..."
there could be a whole lot more than 1116 protiens!!!!!
Da Bump Chaa.
Find something like spit, earwax, or the gunk between your toes, do shotgun DNA sequencing, and call it a something-ome. For bonus, you could supply the sequences as an attached PDF file (I'm not kidding, something like this has been done--800 pages of PDF "supplemental material"). I find these articles in major journals about once a week and they are as boring to read as the list of ingredients on a box of cereal.
Just callin' it like I see it.
I can't understand these posts. Now normally i'd assume that the spam was from bots. Being all the nerds there are on /. one sick guy would spam goatse crap all the time. But someone dissing nerds? Either its a self hating bot-maker nerd in denial. Or real human beings are posting this which would be an order of magnitude worse.
Genome is called a "map", because you "map" genes to the positions in chromosomes and plasmids. This is the first time I see proteome (idiotic term as well) being called a "map".
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
Is that the protein level before or AFTER a date?
Ya know, there are just too many jokes that can be made about this article.....
Knowing Google's lust for data collection, the Soviet Union is still alive and well inside the psyche of Sergey Brin....
& that they're more valuable than robbIE's patentdead/fully censored/stock markup FraUDster owned decaying blog.
Mt. Hoark
Drool Falls
Booger Bayou
Loogie River
Ptui Peak
Use your head, can't you, use your head,
You're on earth, there's no cure for that - S. Beckett
Are there some difficulties involved in finding them? How does one do?
Side note: I for one like needles and stuff, cause I'm interested in medicine and that is as close as I usually get to it. I donate blood, that's a great thing! You get in contact with medical care and get to do things to your body (which is nice, if you're bent like me), you save other people's lives in an old-fashioned "every one need to help now" way (makes it feel like war times) and you can play jokes on the overly caring nurses by standing up quickly and pretending you are about to faint from blood loss. :-)
Swedish plasma phys. PhD student; MSc EE; knows maths, programming, electronics; finance interest; seeks opportunities
Metabolomics has progressed from urine to spittle! Wow, and less smelly!
Ruby Neural Evolution of Augmenting Topologies
Librarian, is that you?
People replying to my sig annoy me. That's why I change it all the time.
You must be new here.
(not the same AC as the goatse guy(s))
I'm more thinking the tag should be "spitorswallow".
I can has sig?
Not to the best of my knowledge. Am I missing a meme?
Soon patients will be properly conditioned to "drool" for the doctor when he rings a bell.
All the research has been done. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivan_Pavlov/
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
http://www.urmc.rochester.edu/pr/news/story.cfm?id=1932
Make sure and gargle with egg whites before you walk into the doctor's office?
Not a meme, but a possibly obscure reference to the orangutan librarian of Discworld.
Your brain is not a computer.
Got about 20 words into the first one and never found time to pick it back up again. Worth it?
1. Boring, plain subjects (like this one) don't get attention, and don't get moderated. You have to use a subject that grabs attention and stimulates curiosity if you don't want to get completely ignored. A lot of good comments go unnoticed because of they have nice proper subject lines.
2. In some cases, it enhances the humor (as has already been mentioned).
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
It starts digesting food.
It attacks germs coming into mouth and alimentary canal.
It may have aphrodesiac properties, stimulating love making.
Its an emergency fluid/lubricant.
It may be social communication - spitting, drooling.
Its state is indicative of physical health.
Others, I've forgotten.
A thousand proteins sounds fair.
Yes, Rochester is in New York State, but it's quite far from New York. A common observation from someone who isn't familiar with the region would be, "oh, it's in New York City!" It's actually a 7 or so hour drive.
Yet when people say Buffalo, Syracuse, or Albany, no one gets confused.
How many different proteins are made by the human body as a whole, if over 1,000 are in saliva? Do current DNA maps tell all the proteins? What are the current esimates?
And kissing just got even sexier!
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18361515?ordinalpos=1&itool=EntrezSystem2.PEntrez.Pubmed.Pubmed_ResultsPanel.Pubmed_RVDocSum
This lobe is easily traumatized, such as discovering that the girl in your class you've been fantasizing about daily for three years still doesn't know your first name.
Primary symptom of knobligate seizure is incessant repetition of memes that long ago ceased to be funny, until the extreme repetition itself is momentarily funny again, at which point the trauma of psycho-sexual oblivion is finally discharged.
Immunity is conferred by owning a jersey with your name lettered in all-caps across the shoulders.
Partial immunity is conferred by owning a jersey with someone else's name lettered across the shoulders, if the person is known to have outrageous earning potential, has a tribal affiliation in good standing to the local community, plays a full contact sport (NB: in a men's league), and never, ever grips another man's testicles except to better recover a fumble.
For some reason, lettering your name onto the back of your Van Halen T-shirt with masking tape has not been observed to work.
The Colour of Magic isn't that great. It's basically a bunch of loosely-connected stories parodying fantasy tropes. The book has its moments, but it mostly serves to introduce the setting for the later and IMO better novels.
But then again, I could be wrong.
huh. skip it and read the next one?
> 1. Boring, plain subjects (like this one) don't get attention, and don't get moderated.
..."
My experience indicates that the only things you have to avoid are:
1) leaving the subject "Re:
2) using a subject which lacks content
I get lots of positive mods using straightforward, rather boring, subjects.
But it's still slashdot.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
You've been playing too much ForumWarz. (http://www.forumwarz.com, browser-based MMORPG about trolling message boards, and one character class has a "Drool on Keyboard" attack)
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
The problem with that is that The Colour of Magic ends with a (fairly literal) cliffhanger, and The Light Fantastic picks it up and runs with it.
The Colour of Magic is not a bad book, it just doesn't contain much of a story. I suppose one could call it a travelogue about a naive tourist and his cowardly escort.
But then again, I could be wrong.
My personal favorites from the series are Thief of Time and Reaper Man, the second featuring Death as one of the main characters. These two struck me as having some very good content character-wise as well as maintaining the usual Discworld quirkiness.
Your brain is not a computer.