The human colon adenocarcinoma cell line HT-29 used in our study possesses functional Toll-like receptor 4 signaling (Lee et al., 2005; Hiippala et al., 2016) that is potentially important for zonulin secretion (Sturgeon and Fasano, 2016) and has been used to study the effects of Lactobacillus strains on gliadin-induced zonulin secretion previously (Xu et al., 2016). The gene discussed is TLR4; the disease is colon adenocarcinoma.