Pour Some Sugar on Me: The Relationship Between Sugar Structure and Ethanol Production, Resulting in Monosaccharides Producing a Greater Amount of Ethanol

Abstract

In this experiment we aimed to understand the relationship between types of sugars and how it affects the fermentation process. We completed this experiment in order to address the question stating how variations between types of sugar, and concentrations of sugar affect the rate of yeast fermentation. While sugar type and ethanol production has been tested (Bauer et al., 2016), we addressed this question differently by exclusively testing monosaccharides and disaccharides without any sort of additives or additional independent variables. We tested this by performing a total of ten trials in which we made a solution that contained either the monosaccharide or disaccharide, yeast, and water and measuring the amount of ethanol produced as a percentage increase over a ten minute period. We hypothesize that sucrose (disaccharide) will yield higher amounts of ethanol than monosaccharide (glucose) sugars will provide more reactant material for yeast to metabolize more quickly yielding more carbon dioxide and ethanol. The procedure resulted in our data depicting a similar percentage increase between both independent variables, in addition, our Kruskal-Wallis test stated that our data was non-significant.