Most people worldwide suffer from dental caries. Only a small part of the population is caries-resistant and the reason for this resistance in unknown. Only a few studies compared the saliva pro-tein composition of persons with carious teeth and persons ith no caries. Our study is the first to relate proteomic analysis of the caries aetiology with gender. In this study, we compared the differences in the abundances of proteins in the saliva between caries-resistant and caries-susceptible females and males by nano-liquid chromatography-tandem mass spec-trometry (Label-Free Quantitative Proteomics). Our results demonstrate that the observed differences in the protein levels might have an influence on anti-caries resistance. A total of 19 potential markers of tooth caries were found, for example proteins S100A8 and annexin A1 with higher expression in the caries-susceptible group in comparison with the caries-free group and mucin-5B, lactoferrin, lysozyme C with higher expression in the caries-free group in
comparison with the caries-susceptible group. The presented study is the first complex proteomic and gender project where the saliva protein content of caries-free and caries-susceptible persons were compared by label-free MS. The newly detected potential protein markers of dental caries can be a good basis for further research and for possible future therapeutic use. and Corresponding author: Lucie Kulhavá