Salty, Sweet, Grow: Sodium’s effect on ethanol production in Saccharomyces cerevisiae

Abstract

The Acme Brewing and Baking Company has primarily focused on maximizing yeast growth under a variety of conditions. We decided to center our research on the effect of salt in yeast production. Therefore, we chose to use different amounts of salt concentrations in our experiment to determine whether the difference in concentrations would have an effect on ethanol production. We hypothesized that having a smaller salt concentration will result in an elevated amount of ethanol production. We then compared the ethanol production between two different experimental groups one containing 2g of salt and the other 4g of salt. Based off our results our hypothesis was unsupported, and more ethanol was produced in a higher salt concentration.