Effects of Sugar Concentration on Yeast Population Growth

Abstract

Yeast is a vital part of everyday life and is used in many different ways; it’s used to make a wide variety of products such as bread, biofuels, alcoholic beverages, jams, buttermilk, and other baked goods. This experiment compares the density of yeast with a gradual increase in amounts of sugar. To conduct this experiment, various amounts of sugar were added to different samples having the same initial amount of yeast. The cell density was estimated by using optical density of the solution. After conducting our experiment, it was found that the greater amount of sugar present in a sample, the faster the production of yeast. This finding leads scientists to further explore the option of using yeast to create biofuels because sugar can easily be manipulated to increase the growth of yeast, thus leading to more ethanol, which can be used in fuel.