“…Furthermore, the fi nding that defi ciency of RAGE in general was associated with an exaggerated host response during E. coli sepsis [42] on the one hand, and with an attenuated infl ammatory response and better survival in (other) sterile models of intraperitoneal injection of LPS derived from E. coli [42,44] on the other hand, suggests that although RAGE is involved in the immune reaction to E. coli, this function can be compensated for by other receptors in the presence of a growing bacterial load. Th e high-affi nity RAGE ligand, HMGB1, is secreted into the circulation systemically during clinical sepsis [16][17][18] as well as in our experimental sepsis model of E. coli [43]. Importantly, HMGB1 has been shown to transduce cellular signals in vitro and in vivo by interacting with at least three other receptors, i.e., TLR2, TLR4 and TLR9 when HMGB1 is complexed with CPG DNA [24,44,45].…”