How the Different Sugars; Corn Sugar, Rice Sugar, and Dextrose Affect CO2 Production During Yeast (Saccharomyces cerevisiae) Fermentation

Abstract

In this experiment we examined how different types of sugar affected the amount of CO₂ production in yeast fermentation. Saccharomyces cerevisiae (Baker’s yeast) is one of the most commonly used microorganisms in today’s world. Because of its wide range of uses, researchers have been able to analyze what maximizes yeast growth under different conditions. This allows us to understand what factors may induce optimum strategies for yeast fermentation. By doing more research on it the industries can know how to produce more yeast at a quicker and more cost-efficient rate since yeast is used for many things like alcohol production, baking goods, and industrial ethanol. Yeast breaks down sugar to create CO₂ during fermentation, which is why we chose to study how the different kinds of sugars effect it. We hypothesized that corn sugar will produce the most amount of CO₂ compared to rice and dextrose sugar because corn sugar is made up of the same compounds as dextrose but contains more compounds. We are testing corn sugar, rice sugar, and dextrose because we would like to expand on a similar article by Andrews, A., D., Barkyoumb, S., Beller, S. Bodenhammer, and S., Windle found in Journal of Introductory Biology Investigations. To test our hypothesis, we placed 0.80 grams of the different types of sugar in 38 milliliters of water, 80 microliters of sodium phosphate, and 1mL of yeast. We stirred the mixture for ten minutes and collected the amount of CO₂ released with a CO₂ sensor that was placed in the mixture’s container. Our results showed that dextrose sugar produced the most amount of CO₂ during fermentation and our hypothesis was not supported based on the data collected.