Yeasty Boys: Comparing the Saccharomyces cerevisiae CO2 Output of Various Sucrose Concentrations

Abstract

Baker’s yeast has been used by humans for thousands of years. Yeast is so essential to many industries today. In order to improve production, industries find it important to find out what nutrients will improve their growth (Gissendaner et al. 2017). Sugar serves as the substance that allows yeast to produce CO₂, ethanol, and ATP (Taylor et al. 2017). Our goal was to explore the effects of different concentrations of sucrose would have on the CO2 production of baker’s yeast, Saccharomyces cerevisiae. We hypothesized that the 3% sucrose concentration will produce the most CO₂ because other studies have demonstrated high CO₂ production around 2-3% sugar concentration. In order to test our hypothesis, we preformed several trials in which three different levels of sucrose were tested. Our results showed that 3% sucrose concentration was the highest CO₂ output.