Can Escherichia coli survive on glucose and water alone?

Question

I am novice to biochemistry and biology in general. I am reading Lehninger Principles of Biochemistry, and I found the following sentence at the beginning of the chapter on glycolysis:

A bacterium such as Escherichia coli can obtain from glucose the carbon skeletons for every amino acid, nucleotide, coenzyme, fatty acid, or other metabolic intermediate it needs for growth.

Does this mean that E.coli can survive in a medium containing H₂O and glucose alone? E.coli can synthesize any other nutrient it needs?

Answer 1

The minimum requirement for E. coli and other bacteria to grow and survive is called minimal medium. It's even defined at Merriam-Webster:

a medium that contains only inorganic salts, a simple carbon source (as carbon dioxide or glucose), and water

Water and glucose are pretty easy, but the source of salts may often change; regardless, you really need some potassium, phosphate, and nitrogen for amino acid synthesis. This page has a bunch of information on bacterial growth, including some "recipes" for a few bacterial strains. For E. coli, the classic media is M9, which over at Sigma is made of:

• 33.9g Na₂HPO₄.7H₂O
• 15g KH₂PO₄
• 5g NH₄Cl
• 2.5g NaCl

per litre of solution.

Here are some other recipes.

Answer 2

Yes, but no. In other words, this quote is not probably not true in the ways you'd think. Bacteria can survive on practically nothing for long periods of time, but whether you call that life is subjective.

Nitrogen is necessary for all the co-enzymes and proteins to sustain life. In order to get energy, if E coli. needs to metabolize nitrogen to waste at all, all the bacteria would eventually all die out. The same feat for human beings would be to add a little sugar into sewage and surviving on it. Nobody would die right away, but its hard to call that living maybe.

Unless a medium is exchanged, E coli in a laboratory culture will start a massive die off. When the E coli culture becomes terminal in this way, a portion of the bacteria go into stationary phases where the bacteria can survive for very long times - for months or possibly years. So some of the bacteria would survive, but they would be dormant. You might not call this survival, but tens of thousands of bacteria are still alive and can generate colonies if transferred to fresh media.

Laboratory cultures and media are of course artificial conditions which don't reflect the environment which bacteria are adapted. In their life cycle, they typically have other sorts of behavior and experience low nutrient conditions often enough. Bacteria are also different in that a 99.99% die off can be considered a typical event in some cases.