17 As part of a Chinese Thousand Talents Program Award, Michel Georges and Carole Charlier collaborated with the laboratory of Professor Lusheng Huang (Nanchang, China) to study the effect of the host genome on the composition of its intestinal microbiota. To that end, the unit of Animal Genomics tooks advantage of an exceptional mosaic pig population with exacerbated genetic diversity yet reduced environmental variation established in a >10 years effort by Professor Huang. It allowed them to demonstrate the he- ritable nature of the abundance of at least some bacterial taxa, and - most importantly – to identify a locus with major effect on the abundance of specific Erysipelotrichaceae ge- nera. The researchers showed that the causative variant is a null allele in the porcine gene corresponding to the ABO blood group in human. They showed that this allele acts by reducing the abundance of GalNAc in the intestinal mucus. This affects the growth of bacteria that use GalNAC as car- bon source using a non-inducible GalNAc operon. Preliminary results point towards the fact that the balanced AO blood group polymorphism in the pig host sustains a ba- lanced polymorphism of the GalNAc operon in the p.75.a5 Erysipelotrichaceae. ABO GENOTYPE ALTERS THE GUT MICROBIOTA BY REGULATING GALNAC LEVELS IN PIGS Yang H, Wu J, Huang X, Zhou Y, Zhang Y, Liu M, Liu Q, Ke S, He M, Fu H, Fang S, Xiong X, Jiang H, Chen Z, Wu Z, Gong H, Tong X, Huang Y, Ma J, Gao J, Charlier C, Coppieters W, Shagam L, Zhang Z, Ai H, Yang B, Georges M, Chen C, Huang L. Nature. 2022 Jun;606(7913):358-367.
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