The main components of precalibration are evaluation of flow system integrity, homogenization efficiency, water repeatability, zero shift, linearity, primary slope, milk repeatability, purging efficiency, and establishment of intercorrection factors.
Moreover, purging efficiency may be limited, even when there is a certain level of inbreeding in the population, as this efficiency needs the average effect of deleterious mutations to be strong relative to the effective population size [2], [46].
Further studies on purging efficiency during such foundations, and research on the effects of interpopulation hybridization between well-established rotifer populations –i.e., studies on outbreeding depression- would shed more light on these topics.
They also confirm that purging efficiency increases with d, as expected.
In contrast, when Nd is substantially above 1, overall purging efficiency is scarcely affected by genome length, although both inbreeding depression and purging can be delayed.
This excess determines the intensity of purging selection, while purging efficiency could be quantified by the reduction it causes of the fitness decline induced by inbreeding.
Nevertheless, tight linkage causes some reduction in the efficiency of purging, due to background selection.
Thus, the per-generation efficiency of purging could be defined as the difference between the per-generation decline expected just from inbreeding and that realized under inbreeding and purging (i.e., the net increase of fitness ascribed to purging).
In the absence of linkage, our results confirm that IP predictions for the efficiency of purging are conservative for Nd > 1, i.e., they predict a somewhat higher inbreeding depression than it is observed.
Using computer simulation we explore the consequences of linkage on the inbreeding load of an equilibrium population, and on the efficiency of purging and the loss of genetic diversity after a reduction in population size.
