Yeast's Food of Choice

Overview

Objectives/Goals My objective is to determine what type of carbohydrate will cause bakers yeast to produce the most carbon dioxide. Methods/Materials The four carbohydrates I tested were fructose, dextrose, sucrose, and corn starch. A 10% yeast solution was added to a 10% solution of the first type of carbohydrate (giving a 5% solution of each) and 10 mL was put in each of four fermentation tubes. After an hour I checked the level of the CO(2) production. I then repeated that process for each of the other carbohydrates. Results The monosaccharides, (dextrose and fructose) produced 6.35 mL and 6.5 mL of CO(2) respectively, while the disaccharide (sucrose) produced 4.25 mL. The polysaccharide (corn starch) produced only .2 mL. Conclusions/Discussion Fructose outperformed dextrose by a slim margin, but it is possible this difference would be narrowed with many additional trials. The difference between the mono- and disaccharides was much larger because the yeast had to break the bond between the glucose and the fructose that make up a sucrose molecule. Corn starch produced almost no CO(2), probably because it was too complex to be digested by yeast.

Competition history

• CSEF 2002 Microbiology · Entry S1318

Resources

• CSEF project summary ↗

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