The Effect of Sucrose Levels in Yeast

Abstract

We studied the effect of increased sucrose in yeast on the amount of CO2 released. Since Baker’s yeast (Saccharomyces cerevisiae) (French 2016a) uses anaerobic respiration due to the lack of oxygen (Hoefnagels 2014), glycolysis plays an important role in producing ATP. By increasing the amount of sucrose, glycolysis would have more sugar to break down, which would in turn create more energy for the cell (Crow et al. 2016). To test if the concentration of sucrose would affect the amount of CO2 released, we measured the CO2 concentration with a CO2 probe of both our control group (1% sucrose), and our experimental group (3% and 5% sucrose), which contained increased amounts of sucrose. We performed three trials for each percentage of sucrose. The results showed that the Saccharomyces cerevisiae with a regular sucrose level had a higher CO2 concentration than the Saccharomyces cerevisiae with higher concentration level. We compared these results with those of similar experiments.