Red Yeast Rice Fermentation with Sucrose and Glucose

Abstract

Red yeast rice (Monascus purpureus) is grown on white rice. It is used for both medicine and cooking, specifically to lower cholesterol and used in Chinese cuisine. Our study focuses on the ability to possibly speed up the fermentation process of this yeast using two different types of sugars, glucose and sucrose. We created two mixtures in a biochamber containing the same concentrations of water, sodium phosphate, yeast, and the type of sugar used, in order to compare CO₂ production of the yeast in each mixture. Our experiment has not been performed before on this type of yeast specifically, though other studies have been done that are similar to ours, they focus on a more common yeast, baker’s yeast. We hypothesized the mixture with glucose would result in greater CO₂ production rather than the mixture with sucrose. Our hypothesis was supported based on the final average rate of each mixture. We only conducted a few trials because we are in the process of developing the techniques needed to work with this species specifically.