RATIONALE: The phthiocerol dimycocerosates (PDIMs) are certain stable and hydrophobic waxes found in the cell membrane of Mycobacterium tuberculosis, bacteria that cause an infectious disease of growing concern worldwide. Previous studies report the analysis of derivatives of the hydrolysed PDIMs from biological samples, following complex extraction and offline derivatization of PDIMs biomarkers, prior to their analysis by gas chromatography/mass spectrometry (GC/MS).METHODS: We developed and optimized a GC/MS method based on selected ion monitoring (SIM) to detect the derivatives produced via the thermally assisted hydrolysis and methylation (THM) of the PDIMs from the cell membrane of M. tuberculosis. The extraction of PDIMs from culture is simple, and their thermochemolysis is carried out automatically online, thus avoiding the time-consuming derivatization steps of hydrolysis and esterification, usually performed offline.RESULTS: For standard PDIMs in petroleum ether, our optimized method gave an excellent linearity (R2 = 0.99) at concentrations between 0.172 and 27.5 ng/mL, a good precision (RSD = 11.42 %), and a limit of detection (LOD) of 100 pg/mL. For the PDIMs extracted from dilutions of M. tuberculosis culture, the method gave good linearity (R2 = 0.9685) and an estimated LOD of 400 CFU/mL (CFU = colony forming units) in sterile distilled water.CONCLUSIONS: A GC/MS(SIM) method is presented for the rapid and quantitative detection of M. tuberculosis, based on the online thermochemolysis of lipidic biomarkers extracted from the bacterial culture. The method has the potential to be applied in human and veterinary clinical laboratories for the rapid diagnosis of tuberculosis in infected biological samples. © 2013 The Authors. Rapid Communications in Mass Spectrometry published by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.