Saliva Analysis Based on Microfluidics: Focusing the Wide Spectrum of Target Analyte

AbstractSaliva is one of the most critical human body fluids that can reflect the state of the human body. The detection of saliva is of great significance for disease diagnosis and health monitoring. Microfluidics, characterized by microscale size and high integration, is an ideal platform for the development of rapid and low-cost disease diagnostic techniques and devices. Microfluidic-based saliva testing methods have aroused considerable interest due to the increasing need for noninvasive testing and frequent or long-term testing. This review briefly described the significance of saliva analysis and generally classified the targets in saliva detection into pathogenic microorganisms, inorganic substances, and organic substances. By using this classification as a benchmark, the state-of-the-art research results on microfluidic detection of various substances in saliva were summarized. This work also put forward the challenges and future development directions of microfluidic detection methods for saliva.Keywords: Analysismicrofluidicssaliva Disclosure statementThe authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.Data availability statementNo data was used for the research described in the article.Author contributionsX.L., XT.S. and HZ.Y. conceptualized the idea of the review. X.L. wrote initial drafts of the manuscript. XY.Z., XJ.L., YX.W. and TL.W. contributed to data collection and graph making. S.L. contributed to writing and manuscript improvement. All authors contributed to writing and reviewing the manuscript and gave approval to the final version of the manuscript.Additional informationFundingThis research was funded by the project from China Post-doctoral Science Foundation (No. 2021MD703911), Natural Science Foundation of Liaoning Province of China (No. 2020-MS-166), Foundation of the Education Department of Liaoning Province in China (No. QN2019035), and National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 81500897).