The future of saliva as an analytical sample

Saliva has gained attention in research mainly because of the noninvasive way in which the samples are obtained, allowing repeated sampling even in very susceptible populations such as children. Moreover, increasing scientific evidence confirms and highlights the potential of saliva as an analytical sample in application to both local and systemic diseases. Several aspects of saliva have been studied in the search of biomarkers for a broad range of disease conditions. Likewise, different techniques have been used, from simple evaluation of salivary flow and colorimetry to more complex omics approaches. However, saliva is still little used in clinical settings, and the main reasons for this are reviewed in this chapter

Open Source Tools for Biological Image Analysis

Visiting the Bio Imaging Search Engine (BISE) (Bio, BISE, Engine, http://biii.eu/, Imaging, Search) website at the time of writing this article, almost 1200 open source assets (components, workflows, collections) were found. This overwhelming range of offer difficults the fact of making a reasonable choice, especially to newcomers. In the following chapter, we briefly sketch the advantages of the open source software (OSS) particularly used for image analysis in the field of life sciences. We introduce both the general OSS idea as well as some programs used for image analysis. Even more, we outline the history of ImageJ as it has served as a role model for the development of more recent software packages. We focus on the programs that are, to our knowledge, the most relevant and widely used in the field of light microscopy, as well as the most commonly used within our facility. In addition, we briefly discuss recent efforts and approaches aimed to share and compare algorithms and introduce software and data sharing good practices as a promising strategy to facilitate reproducibility, software understanding, and optimal software choice for a given scientific problem in the future