I am doing a coculture experiment where I need to infect the RAW cells with E. coli. The E. coli cells used however are induced with arabinose. So do I need to add arabinose to the DMEM media too while infecting with RAW cells? and also to the freshly replaced DMEM after the infection is done, for the whole experimental time period? Are the RAW cells susceptible to getting killed by excessive arabinose concentration in the culture medium?
I think one of the first preparative experiments you can do is to test the cytotoxicity of arabinose on RAW264.7 cells (e.g. by MTT assay). You can easily find out where the toxicity threshold lies, and avoid using doses close to it.
Just by intuition, arabinose may not be metabolized by mammalian cells. But its potential toxicity indeed cannot be ruled out.
Sugar like mannitol (also produced by fungi) is not used by mammalian cells the way sucrose does.
However, it can be used in experiment in place of sucrose to set up osmotic gradient (cells can take up to 270 mM mannitol without dying immediately, but they will enter into stressed state).
Effects of arabinose on mammalian cells are much less known, but as said, it is testable empirically.
Adding arabinose to DMEM will not allow the E. coli to be induced, due to the glucose in the medium. My lab has been doing cell culture infections for a number of years, we switch the tissue culture cells to L15 medium prior to infection with bacteria. L15 has galactose instead of glucose and allows the the arabinose induction to occur.
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