Looking through the supplemental material from this paper (http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0052673) where they used Biolog phenotype arrays, they did not see metabolic activity with M. tuberculosis using sucrose as the sole carbon source. They did see activity with glycerol, so that should serve as a control to show that the technology works with slow growing bacteria.

I remember reading other wise some where.. may be this review by Michael will be useful for you http://mic.sgmjournals.org/content/154/3/679.long

Good luck

Found this: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC169466/

Looks like MTB can only utilize glycerol and glucose. Activity was observed with maltose but the authors suspected glucose present as an impurity.

Looks like I'll have to search for/ order glucose!

Thanks for your help

Hey Shane! I can't give you a definite answer as well. To be honest, I have no idea. But I quickly checked KEGG webpage, where you can find a large list of organisms which are sequenced and you can scan their genome for enzymes... which I did for the alpha-glucosidase, the neccessary enzyme to digest Sucrose... and yes, the strain I used gave me the result that such an enzyme is present (http://www.genome.jp/dbget-bin/www_bfind_sub?dbkey=T02178&keywords=alpha-glucosidase&mode=bfind&max_hit=1000). Ok, it doesn't mean it actually CAN live on sucrose, but at least theoretically it should be possible :)

See the article below, it may assist you -

doi:10.1111/j.1365-2958.2010.07399.x

@Shane: Hopefully you got the idea from the above replies. As far I have known and also after reading the articles cited in the above replies I think the answer of your question is no, but again its an organism and there may be a strain or two which may prove me wrong but the common strains are not able to use sucrose as sole carbon source.

Hi Shane, I would conclude Mtb doesn't use sucrose as C source as we'll. Should ask Sabine Ehrt ([email protected]) or Kyu Ree ([email protected]) on my behalf ; they are the guys.

Best,

Olivier

Thanks everyone, useful info! I think I will try glucose as an alternative.

Glucose will work for sure!

Olivier

Glucose instead sucrose, no b-glucosidase

Thanks Ruben

Hi Shane, M. tuberculosis will grow in glucose presenting an adaptation to starvation measured by the volatiles it produces in such medium. See this link could be helpful: http://opus4.kobv.de/opus4-tuberlin/frontdoor/index/index/docId/3497

What is a suggested concentration? It depends what you want (only cell growth or to produce multibranched lipids and lipopolysacharides!) The balance with nitrogen is important. For the 2nd objective, you must design a media with a large excess of carbon source (may be 50 or 100 % excess carbon in relation with the balance)

Dear Shane, glucose is more appropriate unless you desire to check something better.

Would you suggest a concentration of 0.2 % w/v for glucose? I would like to replace glycerol (6 % v/v) with glucose as a carbon source in Sauton Media. I am using the media to determine MICs. I am observing very low MICs and I would like to make sure it's not due to glycerol dependence, hence the need for glucose.

This production dependes on several genetic and environmental factors. Every strain could produce different MICs level growing on the same media.

To replace 6 % glycerol, 0.2 % glucose is a very different carbon source amount

To replace 6 % glycerol, 0.2 % glucose is a very different carbon source amount

What would you suggest? Or do you think I must try different concentrations i.e., 0.2, 1, 6 % w/v?

@Shane to be certain about the low MIC if standardize your glucose concentration separately and then go for the experimentation.

MTB always prefers to use lipids as carbon source and rarely a sugar. Therefore, sucrose is never a carbon for MTB unless it has been mutated to do so.