Light and Yeast: The Effects of Light on Yeast Growth

Abstract

We believe that yeast will grow better with full exposure to light due to the photoreceptors that are in yeast cells. In order to test this, we altered different bio-chambers to fit the conditions of full light, half-light, and no light. We then observed the cell growth at three different time intervals, the start of the experiment, 30 minutes in, and then after a week. In our observations we noticed that under no light more yeast cells were able to be observed after a week compared to the other conditions. This seemed to prove our hypothesis incorrect. We suspect that our hypothesis is wrong because the yeast may have starved because it did not have enough sugar to survive a week. We also suspect that a variable in our experiment may have been altered due to the human error of differences in movement when our experiment was being transported from where they were stored for the week.