Fig. 5

The influence of FaDu and FaDu^TLR9def conditioned media on macrophage polarization and mRNA cytokine expression. (a) After 48 h of exposure to hypoxia, mRNA from parental FaDu and FaDu^TLR9def cells was extracted to assess their toll-like receptor 9 (TLR9) expression (normoxia, dotted line). p = 0.0571, n = 4. (b) Non-activated macrophages (NA MΦ) (dotted line) were treated with conditioned media (CM) for 2 days prior assessing their polarization phenotype with flow cytometry. Panel (c) illustrates cytokine mRNA expression from MΦ after treatment with CM from hypoxic parental FaDu or FaDu^TLR9def cells. Results are shown as box plots with 95% CI. The dotted line represents NA MΦ. Experiments were repeated a minimum of 5 times. NA vs. CM_HOX-treated MΦ was considered statistically significant when *p ≤ 0.05. The exact p-values can be found in Additional File 5b