Nanopore PromethION Sequencing Identified Structural Variants in the French Canadian population

Between 1608 to 1760 the French colonised Canada and over 8500 pioneers married and left descendants, but in 1760 takeover by the colony of the British crown effectively stopped immigration from France yet the descents of the French population continued to grow in isolation. Since the turn of the 20th-century waves of mostly European immigrants have landed on the shores of Canada, resulting in significantly more intermixing of other ethnic groups. The aim of this study was to construct high-quality blueprint genomes from the French-Canadian population in combination with Illumina WGS, 10X linked reads, and Nanopore long-read data, to understand why, despite mass immigration, the genetic contribution of the original French founders remains predominant, explaining about 90% of the regional gene pool.