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Record W4412402475 · doi:10.1101/2025.07.11.25331388

Frequency enrichment of coding variants in a French-Canadian founder population and its implication for inflammatory bowel diseases

2025· preprint· en· W4412402475 on OpenAlexafffundabout
Claude Bhérer, Jean‐Christophe Grenier, Justin Pelletier, Gabrielle Boucher, Geneviève Gagnon, Philippe Goyette, Dariel Ashton‐Beaucage, Christine Stevens, Robert Battat, Alain Bitton, Philippe M. Campeau, Catherine Laprise, Hailiang Huang, Mark J. Daly, Daniel Taliun, Julie Hussin, Vincent Mooser, John D. Rioux

Bibliographic record

VenuemedRxiv · 2025
Typepreprint
Languageen
FieldBiochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology
TopicGenomics and Rare Diseases
Canadian institutionsMila - Quebec Artificial Intelligence InstituteUniversité du Québec à ChicoutimiMontreal General HospitalUniversité de MontréalMcGill UniversityMontreal Heart InstituteMcGill Genome CentreGenome Canada
FundersInstitute of Nutrition, Metabolism and DiabetesNational Institutes of HealthInstitute of GeneticsFonds de Recherche du Québec - SantéGénome QuébecGenome British ColumbiaInstitute of Infection and ImmunityGovernment of CanadaInstitut de Cardiologie de MontréalBroad InstituteCanadian Institutes of Health ResearchGenome CanadaLeona M. and Harry B. Helmsley Charitable Trust
KeywordsFounder effectInflammatory Bowel DiseasesCoding (social sciences)GenealogyPopulationCoding regionGeneticsInflammatory bowel diseaseBiologyMedicineHistoryDemographyInternal medicineSociologyGeneSocial scienceDisease

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

1 Abstract The genetic features of founder populations with recent bottlenecks, causing some deleterious variants to rise to higher frequencies, can enhance the power of rare variant association studies. French Canadians from Quebec represent a recent founder population with a particular disease heritage comprising more than 30 prevalent Mendelian conditions. Here, we characterize coding variation in this founder population using exome sequencing data from 2,820 French-Canadian participants - patients with inflammatory bowel diseases (IBD), parents and controls from the Quebec IBD cohort. We find that 18% of rare coding variants are 10-100 times more frequent than in non-Finnish Europeans (NFE). A total of 4,133 missense and loss-of-function variants were significantly enriched with a median 28-fold enrichment, revealing the potential for genotype-phenotype associations in this population. We describe significantly enriched pathogenic variants, including those known to account for the increased prevalence of rare diseases in FC compared to other European descent populations, such as Agenesis of corpus callosum and peripheral neuropathy ( SLC12A6 ) and Leigh Syndrome French Canadian type ( LRPPRC ). Finally, we investigate whether rare protein-coding variants, enriched in French Canadians by the founder effect, contribute to the risk of IBD using trio and case/control cohorts. In addition to replicating associations in NOD2 and IL23R, we identified new candidate association signals, including enriched variants in SLC35E3 , and ARSA. Our findings show that, even in well-characterized founder populations like the French Canadians, there remains untapped potential for genetic discovery, revealing both rare and complex disease risk factors through enriched coding variation.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame machine prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.001
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.002
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Observational · Consensus signal: Observational
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.241
Threshold uncertainty score0.485

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0010.002
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0010.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.001
Bibliometrics0.0020.002
Science and technology studies0.0020.001
Scholarly communication0.0010.000
Open science0.0010.000
Research integrity0.0010.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0060.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.011
GPT teacher head0.259
Teacher spread0.248 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designObservational
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".

Quick stats

Citations0
Published2025
Admission routes3
Has abstractyes

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Same venuemedRxiv→Same topicGenomics and Rare Diseases→French-language works237,207→