A reduced incidence of digestive disorders in rabbits is associated with allelic diversity at the TLR4 locus.

Toll-like receptor 4 (TLR4) plays a fundamental role in pathogen recognition and activation of host innate immunity. In this study, we detected five coding single-nucleotide polymorphisms (cSNPs) of the TLR4 gene in New Zealand White rabbits and analyzed their associations with genetic resistance against digestive disorders based on case-control study (125 cases and 147 controls). The five cSNPs included two synonymous mutations (c.57 C>T and c.1098 G>A) and three non-synonymous mutations (c.566 G>A, c.760 G>A, and c.923 A>G), which totally determined two alleles (haplotypes) H1 (the five cSNPs: CGGAG) and H2 (the five cSNPs: TAAGA) with pair-wise LD (D') estimates of 1.0. The frequencies of alleles and genotypes significantly differed between case group and control group (P<0.05). The association analyses revealed that allele H2 carried a potential protective role with an odds ratio (OR) value of 0.521 (95% confidence interval 0.324-0.837, P=0.0064). To our knowledge, this is first report to study the genetic polymorphism of TLR4 gene and association with incidence of digestive disorders in rabbits.