Sukirth Ganesan, assistant professor in periodontics, and a team of researchers in the Carver College of Medicine, including Eric Taylor (Physiology), Ashutosh Mangalam and Kevin Legge (Pathology), were awarded a Carver Trust COVID-19 Pilot Collaborative Award. The grant, Unraveling the role of saliva in COVID-19 pathogenesis using a comprehensive multi-omics approach, will involve a multi-arm, cross-sectional, case-control study with an integrated -omics approach to determine the microbial, metabolic, functional, and immune alterations in the saliva of COVID-19 patients. Especially, with the recent publications highlighting an important role of saliva in transmission in SARS-nCoV2 infections, the grant will help in understanding the pathogenesis of SARS-nCoV2. The multidisciplinary team draws expertise in microbiome, oral biology, metabolomics, viral genomics, immunology, and infectious diseases with Ganesan, Mangalam, and Taylor as Co-Principal investigators, Legge as co-investigator, and Val Sheffield (Molecular Genetics) and Katherine Imborek (Influenza-like-Illness clinics) as consultants. Total funding for this award is $74,900 and the one-year project starts from June 1, 2021.