Yeast Your Way! The effects of different sugars on ethanol production in yeast.

Abstract

In the alcohol industry yeast’s ethanol production is essential to their success.  Constantly different variations of sugars are tested in order to find the most efficient version for yeast production (Bai 2008).  In this experiment we are tested the amount of ethanol produced by yeast when introduced to five different sugars:  rice sugar, corn sugar, lactose, glucose, and sucrose in order to find the most effective form of sugar for ethanol production.  After conducting this experiment, we found that while the initial values of ethanol produced may show that a certain sugar was more productive than another, the standard deviations that were found resulted in the fact that these results could change from test to test.  This idea is apparent when comparing the first set of trials to the second set of trials in this experiment.  In order to more accurately predict which sugar is most effective, more trials need to be run and more accurate data needs to be collected.