Cholesterol can be a major carbon source for Mycobacterium tuberculosis during infection, both at an early stage in the macrophage phagosome and later within the necrotic granuloma. KstR is a highly conserved TetR family transcriptional repressor that regulates a large set of genes responsible for cholesterol catabolism. Many genes in this regulon, including kstR, are either induced during infection or are essential for survival of M. tuberculosis in vivo. In this study, we identified two ligands for KstR, both of which are CoA thioester cholesterol metabolites with four intact steroid rings. A metabolite in which one of the rings was cleaved was not a ligand. We confirmed the ligand-protein interactions using intrinsic tryptophan fluorescence and showed that ligand binding strongly inhibited KstR-DNA binding using surface plasmon resonance (IC 50 for Tuberculosis remains a global threat to human health due to the emergence of extremely drug-resistant forms of Mycobacterium tuberculosis and co-infection with HIV (1). Elucidation of metabolic networks essential to the pathogenesis of M. tuberculosis is an important part of the quest to identify new drug target candidates that can be exploited to tackle extremely drug-resistant tuberculosis. In particular, M. tuberculosis possesses an unusual ability to metabolize lipids, and its genome is heavily orientated toward this task with the involvement of a remarkable number of genes, ϳ250, constituting around 6% of its genome (2).Cholesterol, the dominant lipid accumulated in M. tuberculosis-induced foamy macrophages, is a key growth substrate for M. tuberculosis in the intraphagosomal environment and is also important to the bacterium in necrotizing granulomas in late stage infection (3-5). M. tuberculosis is capable of utilizing cholesterol as a sole carbon source for both energy synthesis and assimilation into membrane lipids (3, 6). Many genes in the cholesterol degradation pathway are up-regulated or are essential for M. tuberculosis infection in various models of disease (3,4,(7)(8)(9)(10)(11). Disruption of genes encoding cholesterol catabolic enzymes, either through genetic manipulation or chemically, inhibits growth of the bacterium in both macrophage and animal models, and in vitro experiments suggest that this growth inhibition may be due to the toxicity of accumulated intermediates (4, 9, 12).The cholesterol degradation pathway is regulated by two TFRs, 7 KstR and KstR2 (13,14). These regulate two distinct regulons and negatively autoregulate their own expression. KstR regulates the expression of the genes involved in the trans-