Figure 2. Proteolytic activities of MMPs in tissue extract supernatants and gingival crevicular fluid samples from healthy and diseased patients. The proteolytic activities of MMPs were determined in tissue extract supernatants (TES/A) and gingival crevicular fluid samples (GCFs/B) from healthy and diseased patients by quantification of the percentage of degradation of a biotinylated substrate: human collagen type-1 for MMP-1, casein for MMP-3, and gelatin for both MMP-2 and MMP-9. Controls in TES/A indicate the results obtained when 1 µg of each purified human MMP was used in the assay. Results were obtained from three different experiments (n = 3), and activity was expressed as mean ± SE percentage of biotinylated substrate degraded/mg of total proteins/hr. (*) indicated that the Mann-Whitney Rank Sum Test showed a statistically significant difference between diseased and healthy tissue extract supernatants (p < 0.002) and between diseased and healthy gingival crevicular fluid samples (p < 0.001).
