Figure 4

E. coli is more potent than L. acidophilus in up-regulating Tlr2, Nfkb1, and Nfkb2 expression and in down-regulating expression of Tlr4 and Clec7a in foetal epithelial cells. Epithelial cells from foetuses at Day-1 were stimulated for 2 h and 4 h with LPS (10 μg/ml), L. acidophilus NCFM (10, 30 and 100 μg/ml) or E. coli Nissle (1, 10, 30 μg/ml). Gene expression was measured by RT-PCR. Symbols indicate mean and SD of 4 independent experiments with cells pooled from 6-10 pups. ***p < 0.001, **p < 0.01, *p < 0.05 compared to "unstimulated cells". Data were normalised to Actb and then to the average of "unstimulated cells 2 h" from the 4 experiments, which was defined to 1.