Suga suga how you get so fly?: Effects of amount of rice sugar on ethanol production of Saccharomyces cerevisiae (Baker’s Yeast)

Abstract

Baker’s yeast, Saccharomyces cerevisiae, is becoming the microorganism most used for industrial purposes. While yeast is normally thought of to make consumable goods, such as bread and alcoholic beverages, it has been more recently used to make biofuels. Yeast is now used more often as a biomass, for it produces ethanol, which can be used as a fuel source. Because of its increasing importance in our industrialized world, we sought to find the pristine conditions that would allow for the highest production of ethanol. We hypothesized that if the amount of sugar increases, then the production of ethanol will also increase. In order to test this hypothesis, we placed rice sugar in Baker’s Yeast and recorded the output of ethanol. This was tested by using three different amounts of rice sugar: 1.6g, 2.4g, and 3.2g. After doing this experiment, we found that the highest production of ethanol was with 1.6g of rice sugar. This means that our results did not support our hypothesis, and the presence of rice sugar does change the production of yeast.