Many microbiology processes involve:
1. Growing a starter culture to high density
2. Back diluting into fresh media by some dilution factor, eg, 1:100
3. Growing to OD X (eg, OD=0.5)
4. Harvesting for some assay, extraction, or process
My question is: How can you predict/understand the dilution factor necessary?
In this case, I'm asking about RNA extraction for qPCR, but I'm interested in the question more broadly.