The emerging landscape of salivary diagnostics

Saliva as a diagnostic tool provides a noninvasive, simple and low-cost method for disease detection and screening. Saliva collection is more practical and comfortable compared with other invasive methods, and saliva can be a desirable body fluid for biomarker detection in clinical applications. The integration of omics methods has allowed accurate detection and quantification of transcripts found in saliva and a group of biomarkers has been discovered and validated in a series of studies. Here we review recent developments in salivary diagnostics that have been accomplished using salivaomics, the mechanisms of saliva diagnostics, as well as the translational and clinical application of saliva biomarkers.