Under normal conditions, self nucleic acids are not recognized by TLRs due to multiple levels of regulation including receptor compartmentalization, trafficking and proteolytic processing (Barton GM et al 2006, Ewald SE et al 2008). At steady state TLR3, TLR7, TLR8, TLR9 reside primarily in the endoplasmic reticulum (ER), however, their activation by specific ligands only occurs within acidified endolysosomal compartments (Hacker H et al 1998, Funami K et al 2004, Gibbard RJ et al 2006). Several chaperon proteins associate with TLRs in the ER to provide efficient translocation to endolysosome. Upon reaching endolysosomal compartments the ectodomains of TLR7 and TLR9 are proteolytically cleaved by cysteine endoproteases. Both full-length and cleaved C-terminus of TLR9 bind CpG-oligodeoxynucleotides, however it has been proposed that only the processed receptor is functional.

Although similar cleavage of TLR3 has been reported by Ewald et al 2011, other studies demonstrated that the N-terminal region of TLR3 ectodomain was implicated in ligand binding, thus TLR3 may function as a full-length receptor (Liu L et al 2008, Tokisue T et al 2008).

There are no data on TLR8 processing, although the cell biology of TLR8 is probably similar to TLR9 and TLR7 (Gibbard RJ et al 2006, Wei T et al 2009).