Webinar Details

Title: Beyond the Host Genome: Host Genetics and Gut Microbiome Determinism in Livestock
Date: 9 April 2025
Time: 11:00 AM EDT | 4:00 PM BST | 5:00 PM CEST
Location: Zoom
Presenters: Catherine Larzul & Jordi Estellé (INRAE, France)
Registration: https://us06web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_QI8ZX7ZBThK3cKmHC6hYbA

Description 

Animal-associated microbiomes play a crucial role in host physiology, significantly influencing livestock phenotypes. Understanding these associations is crucial for developing strategies to enhance livestock productivity, improve animal health and welfare, and mitigate the environmental impact of farming. Beyond nutritional interventions like pre- and probiotics, leveraging host genetics offers a promising approach to modulate microbiomes and consequently, host-associated traits.

Building on our foundational work exploring pig enterotypes, we aimed at further elucidating the host genetic determinism underpinning these enterotypes. In this webinar, we will present our most recent advancements in linking host genetics with the microbiome in pigs. In a divergent selection experiment, we demonstrated the influence of host genetics on gut microbiota. By structuring the gut microbiota into two distinct enterotypes—one enriched in Prevotella and Mitsuokella, the other in Ruminococcus and Treponema—we successfully drove the frequency of these enterotypes across generations. The selection process increased the average relative abundances of both directly and indirectly selected bacterial taxa, significantly influencing the prevalence of the selected enterotypes in each line. Based on the functional divergences between enterotypes, analyzed using a pig metagenome catalogue previously established, we will discuss hypotheses to be explored in future research.

Overall, our recent findings highlight holobionts as units of selection and emphasize the potential of incorporating microbiome data into breeding and selection schemes. Future challenges include evaluating the feasibility and cost-effectiveness of large-scale microbiome-informed breeding programs and updating statistical and modeling approaches to integrate microbiome data effectively. This webinar is organized by the Phytobiomes Alliance Animal Microbiomes Working Group.