Figure 12.

Contents of tagatose and downstream metabolites from pyruvate. Metabolites were extracted from S. mutans, S. gordonii, and S. oralis cells after three hours of incubation in CDM with or without tagatose, followed by determination of those levels using GC-MS. To minimize the effects of different growth stages, the OD₆₀₀ value was set to 0.8 before starting the culture. Bars represent the mean ± S.D. (n = 4). P-values were determined with Student’s t-test.