Approved Research

Using a founder population to study the genetic transmissions in epilepsies

Lay summary

The main objective of our research is to better characterize a known founder population: the French-Canadian (FC) population of Quebec and to use this population for our research . This population originates from various migration waves, notably from France, Ireland and other European countries. As with most migration events, we know that a limited number of ancestors contributed to a significant portion of the genetic pool of the current population. For the FC population, most of these important founders migrated from France between 1660 and 1760. Our group studies the FC population to better understand many diseases, notably epilepsy (IRB UQAC #F8-1218). However, the FC remains understudied compared to other well documented founder population. This current proposal aims to directly compare the FC population against several population from many ethnic origins in order to evaluate how the knowledge on the later populations could translate to the FC population.