The Effects of Saccharide Composition on the Carbon Dioxide Production in the Baker's yeast Fermentation Process

Abstract

The production of baker’s yeast, Saccharomyces cerevisiae, has become a popular topic of experimentation in the world of baking, ethanol production, and newly, the creation of biofuels. We conducted this experiment in order to determine which type of sugar- monosaccharide, disaccharide, or polysaccharide- will produce the most optimal form of Baker's yeast, based on carbon dioxide production. We tested carbon dioxide production as a byproduct of fermentation. We hypothesized that rice sugar would produce the most optimal form of Baker's yeast with the largest carbon dioxide production because of the energy located in the hundreds of bonds in this polysaccharide.We conducted an experiment to determine which form of saccharide would produce the most optimal form of Baker's yeast, based on carbon dioxide production. By using the fermentation chamber and carbon dioxide sensor, we were able to determine that glucose and brown sugar had relatively similar averages, only being separated by 1.72 ppm/min. While brown sugar and glucose had similar averages, rice sugar was comparatively lower by almost 30 ppm/min. Glucose and brown sugar were able to produce similar results because of their similar compositions. This would allow glucose and brown sugar to be equally consistent and reliable yeast producers. Therefore, we found our hypothesis to be unsupported because both brown sugar and glucose provide similar values of carbon dioxide output.