Horseflies are economically important blood-feeding arthropods and also a nuisance for humans and vectors for filariasis. They rely heavily on the pharmacological properties of their saliva to get a blood meal and suppress immune reactions of hosts. Little information is available on antihemostatic substances in horsefly salivary glands; especially no horsefly immune suppressants have been repo...

beta-Defensins are cationic peptides with broad-spectrum antimicrobial activity that are produced by epithelia at mucosal surfaces. Two human beta-defensins, HBD-1 and HBD-2, were discovered in 1995 and 1997, respectively. However, little is known about the expression of HBD-1 or HBD-2 in tissues of the oral cavity and whether these proteins are secreted. In this study, we characterized the exp...

The possibility of chemical modification of peptides and proteins under the condition of proteolytic digestions and FABMS analysis was investigated. The results ;indicate that among the amino acid constituents of peptides and proteins: serinefcysteine, and cystine are the most sensitive residues which undergo chemical modificadons under the exprimenta1 conditions. The chemical modification ...

PSP (parotid secretory protein)/SPLUNC2 (short palate, lung and nasal epithelium clone 2) is expressed in human salivary glands and saliva. The protein exists as an N-glycosylated and non-glycosylated form and both appear to induce agglutination of bacteria, a major antibacterial function for salivary proteins. Both forms of PSP/SPLUNC2 bind LPS (lipopolysaccharide), suggesting that the protein...

While most adult Lepidoptera use flower nectar as their primary food source, butterflies in the genus Heliconius have evolved the novel ability to acquire amino acids from consuming pollen. Heliconius butterflies collect pollen on their proboscis, moisten the pollen with saliva, and use a combination of mechanical disruption and chemical degradation to release free amino acids that are subseque...

Celiac disease (CD) is an inflammatory disorder triggered by ingested gluten, causing immune-mediated damage to the small-intestinal mucosa. Gluten proteins are strikingly similar in amino acid composition and sequence to proline-rich proteins (PRPs) in human saliva. On the basis of this feature and their shared destination in the gastrointestinal tract, we hypothesized that salivary PRPs may m...

Members of the antigen I/II family of cell surface proteins are highly conserved, multifunctional adhesins that mediate interactions of oral streptococci with other oral bacteria, with cell matrix proteins (e.g., type I collagen), and with salivary glycoproteins, e.g., gp340. The interaction of gp340 (formerly designated salivary agglutinin) with Streptococcus mutans requires an alanine-rich re...

Salivary agglutinin is a high molecular mass component of human saliva that binds Streptococcus mutans, an oral bacterium implicated in dental caries. To study its protein sequence, we isolated the agglutinin from human parotid saliva. After trypsin digestion, a portion was analyzed by matrix-assisted laser/desorption ionization time-of-flight mass spectrometry (MALDI-TOF MS), which gave the mo...

OBJECTIVES: The purpose of the study was to determine salivary composition Oral squamous cell carcinoma patients. METHODOLOGY: A retrospective conducted over 6 months on data 60 patients obtained from patient records Institute Radiotherapy and Nuclear Medicine, Peshawar. Salivary pH, Sodium, Potassium, total proteins were recorded. RESULTS: protein concentration in saliva oral 23.5 mM/L, 96.7mM...

BACKGROUND The composition of the salivary microbiota has been reported to differentiate between patients with periodontitis, dental caries and orally healthy individuals. To identify characteristics of diseased and healthy saliva we thus wanted to compare saliva metaproteomes from patients with periodontitis and dental caries to healthy individuals. METHODS Stimulated saliva samples were col...