The cientificWorldJOURNAL Research Article Proteomic Analysis of Saliva Identifies Potential Biomarkers for Orthodontic Tooth Movement

Copyright © 2012 Mohd Faiz Ellias et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Orthodontic treatment has been shown to induce inflammation, followed by bone remodelling in the periodontium. These pro-cesses trigger the secretion of various proteins and enzymes into the saliva. This study aims to identify salivary proteins that change in expression during orthodontic tooth movement. These differentially expressed proteins can potentially serve as protein bio-markers for the monitoring of orthodontic treatment and tooth movement. Whole saliva from three healthy female subjects were collected before force application using fixed appliance and at 14 days after 0.014′ ′ Niti wire was applied. Salivary proteins were resolved using two-dimensional gel electrophoresis (2DE) over a pH range of 3–10, and the resulting proteome profiles were com-pared. Differentially expressed protein spots were then identified by MALDI-TOF/TOF tandem mass spectrometry. Nine proteins were found to be differentially expressed; however, only eight were identified by MALDI-TOF/TOF. Four of these proteins