Escherichia coli mutants partially defective in CTP: phosphatidic acid cytidylyltransferase (CDP-diglyceride synthetase) are more resistant to the antibiotic erythromycin than are isogenic wild type strains. When 100 micrograms/ml erythromycin is added to nutrient agar plates, it is possible to obtain a 30-fold enrichment for cds mutants from a mutagen-treated stock, as judged by colony autoradiography (Ganong, B. R., Leonard, J. M., and Raetz, C. R. H. (1980) J. Biol. Chem. 255, 1623-1629). Using this approach, we have isolated 38 new cds mutants, nine of which are unable to grow at a culture pH greater than 8. A typical conditionally lethal mutant like GN80 contains a 3 to 5% phosphatidic acid below pH 7. Above pH 8, GN80 accumulates phosphatidic acid to about 30% of the total membrane lipid, while the de novo syntheses of phosphatidylethanolamine and phosphatidylglycerol are abruptly inhibited by over 10-fold. GN80 loses viability after 60 min at pH 8.5, and the liponucleotide pool of GN80 is about one-seventh that of an isogenic wild type, GN85, under these conditions. The pH optimum of the residual CDP-diglyceride synthetase present in extracts of GN80 is 0.5 pH units lower than normal. Twenty-one of 26 spontaneous pH-resistant revertants of GN80 concomitantly regain parental levels of the enzyme. Our results constitute definitive physiological proof that CDP-diglyceride is an obligatory precursor for over 90% of the phosphatidylethanolamine and phosphatidylglycerol in E. coli. Independent evidence for this is provided by the observation that cytidine auxotrophs, which are defective in the conversion of UTP to CTP, also accumulate very high levels of phosphatidic acid after 1 h of cytidine starvation.