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Background Most interactions between the host and its microbiota occur at the gut barrier, and primary colonizers are essential in the gut barrier maturation in the early life. The mother–ofspring transmission of microorganisms is the most important factor infuencing microbial colonization in mammals, and C‑section delivery (CSD) is an impor‑ tant disruptive factor of this transfer. Recently, the deregulation of symbiotic host‑microbe interactions in early life has been shown to alter the maturation of the immune system, predisposing the host to gut barrier dysfunction and infammation. The main goal of this study is to decipher the role of the early‑life gut microbiota‑barrier alterations and its links with later‑life risks of intestinal infammation in a murine model of CSD. Results The higher sensitivity to chemically induced infammation in CSD mice is related to excessive exposure to a too diverse microbiota too early in life. This early microbial stimulus has short‑term consequences on the host homeo‑ stasis. It switches the pup’s immune response to an infammatory context and alters the epithelium structure and the mucus‑producing cells, disrupting gut homeostasis. This presence of a too diverse microbiota in the very early life involves a disproportionate short‑chain fatty acids ratio and an excessive antigen exposure across the vulnerable gut barrier in the frst days of life, before the gut closure. Besides, as shown by microbiota transfer experiments, the microbiota is causal in the high sensitivity of CSD mice to chemical‑induced colitis and in most of the phenotypical parameters found altered in early life. Finally, supplementation with lactobacilli, the main bacterial group impacted by CSD in mice, reverts the higher sensitivity to infammation in ex‑germ‑free mice colonized by CSD pups’ microbiota. Conclusions Early‑life gut microbiota‑host crosstalk alterations related to CSD could be the linchpin behind the phe‑ notypic efects that lead to increased susceptibility to an induced infammation later in life in mice. Keywords C‑section delivery, Microbiota, Primary colonization, Early life, Infammation, Gut barrier, Murine model info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion

Background In humans and livestock species, genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have been applied to study the association between variants distributed across the genome and a phenotype of interest. To discover genetic polymorphisms affecting the duodenum, liver, and muscle transcriptomes of 300 pigs from 3 different breeds (Duroc, Landrace, and Large White), we performed expression GWAS between 25,315,878 polymorphisms and the expression of 13,891 genes in duodenum, 12,748 genes in liver, and 11,617 genes in muscle. Results More than 9.68 × 1011 association tests were performed, yielding 14,096,080 significantly associated variants, which were grouped in 26,414 expression quantitative trait locus (eQTL) regions. Over 56% of the variants were within 1 Mb of their associated gene. In addition to the 100-kb region upstream of the transcription start site, we identified the importance of the 100-kb region downstream of the 3′UTR for gene regulation, as most of the cis-regulatory variants were located within these 2 regions. We also observed 39,874 hotspot regulatory polymorphisms associated with the expression of 10 or more genes that could modify the protein structure or the expression of a regulator gene. In addition, 2 motifs (5′-GATCCNGYGTTGCYG-3′ and a poly(A) sequence) were enriched across the 3 tissues within the neighboring sequences of the most significant single-nucleotide polymorphisms in each cis-eQTL region. Conclusions The 14 million significant associations obtained in this study are publicly available and have enabled the identification of expression-associated cis-, trans-, and hotspot regulatory variants within and across tissues, thus shedding light on the molecular mechanisms of regulatory variations that shape end-trait phenotypes. info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion

Additional file 3: Table S1. Correlation of the Euclidean distances between samples in each pair of datasets. Table S2. ASV responsible for 30% of the estimated b2 under the best predictive model for LYM_PHAGO_FITC.

Additional file 2: Fig. S1. Evolution of heritability estimates along iterations in an holobiont model in CRP to illustrate convergence of the MCMC chain. Fig. S2. PCA for the individual batches and the merged dataset of CLR-transformed ASV abundances. Fig. S3. Distribution of reads per sample in the merged 16S sequencing data after quality control. Fig. S4. Distribution of CLR-transformed ASV abundances, averaged across samples. Fig. S5. Distribution of the ASV heritability estimates.

Pig industry is facing new challenges that make necessary to reorient breeding programs to produce more robust and resilient pig populations. The aim of the present work was to study the genetic determinism of lymphocyte subpopulations in the peripheral blood of pigs and identify genomic regions and biomarkers associated to them. For this purpose, we stained peripheral blood mononuclear cells to measure ten immune-cell-related traits including the relative abundance of different populations of lymphocytes, the proportions of CD4+ T cells and CD8+ T cells, and the ratio of CD4+/CD8+ T cells from 391 healthy Duroc piglets aged 8 weeks. Medium to high heritabilities were observed for the ten immune-cell-related traits and significant genetic correlations were obtained between the proportion of some lymphocytes populations. A genome-wide association study pointed out 32 SNPs located at four chromosomal regions on pig chromosomes SSC3, SSC5, SSC8, and SSCX as significantly associated to T-helper cells, memory T-helper cells and γδ T cells. Several genes previously identified in human association studies for the same or related traits were located in the associated regions, and were proposed as candidate genes to explain the variation of T cell populations such as CD4, CD8A, CD8B, KLRC2, RMND5A and VPS24. The transcriptome analysis of whole blood samples from animals with extreme proportions of γδ T, T-helper and memory T-helper cells identified differentially expressed genes (CAPG, TCF7L1, KLRD1 and CD4) located into the associated regions. In addition, differentially expressed genes specific of different T cells subpopulations were identified such as SOX13 and WC1 genes for γδ T cells. Our results enhance the knowledge about the genetic control of lymphocyte traits that could be considered to optimize the induction of immune responses to vaccines against pathogens. Furthermore, they open the possibility of applying effective selection programs for improving immunocompetence in pigs and support the use of the pig as a very reliable human biomedical model.

Trabajo presentado en 73rd Annual Meeting of the European Federation of Animal Science (EAAP), celebrado en Oporto (Portugal), entre el 5 y el 9 de septiembre de 2022.

Trabajo presentado en la XX Reunión Nacional de Mejora Genética Animal, celebrada en Madrid, en la Escuela Técnica Superior de Ingeniería Agronómica, Alimentaria y de Biosistemas de la Universidad Politécnica de Madrid (UPM), del 1 al 3 de junio de 2022.

The aim of this study was to identify the regions involved in the genetic control of the composition of different microbial communities present in the rabbit cecum. The available material consisted of the genotypes (~200K SNPs) and a set of microbial traits representative of the cecal microbiota of 412 rabbits. Two approaches were used to identify host genomic regions associated with microbial phenotypes: mixed regression model for each SNP (MIX-GWAS) and a simultaneous fit of all SNPs, assuming a priori that only 1% have an effect, with BayesC. Initially, in order to evaluate the statistical power of both approaches, a simulated microbial phenotype generated under the structure of the real data was analyzed for three heritability scenarios. Simulation results suggest rather limited power of both approaches with the available data to detect the QTNs associated with the variation of cecal microbiota. Although the probability of capturing a signal corresponding to a QTN is higher with the MIX-GWAS, the positive predictive value of this approach is one-third that of the BayesC. Only the analysis of the real data with the MIX-GWAS method declared a QTL region on chromosome 12 associated with the variation of an OTU belonging to the genus Butyricimonas. This result suggests that a variant in this chromosome could favor the presence of butyrate-producing bacteria in the rabbit cecum and contribute to maintaining the integrity of its mucosa. The important role in the immune system of a membrane protein encoded by the CD83 gene located on the proximal end of chromosome 12 makes it a good candidate to explain variations in the abundance of bacteria belonging to genus Butyricimonas.