Fig. 1.

Detection of soluble Toll-like receptor (sTLR)-4 in human saliva: (a) decreasing concentration of recombinant TLR-4Fc was subjected to immunoblot analysis with goat anti-human TLR-4 polyclonal antibody. (b) Precleaned unstimulated whole saliva (UWS) samples (lanes 3–5) from normal individuals containing 10 µg of proteins were probed with the anti-human TLR-4 polyclonal antibody. Up to four sTLR-4 peptides were detected. Lanes 1 and 2 represent molecular weight (MW) and recombinant TLR-4-Fc respectively. (c) The specificity of the detection was confirmed by performing protein (TLR-4Fc) competition by immunoblotting.