Fermentation Lab

Background
Yeast is a single-celled eukaryotic organism. It is also heterotrophic, which means that it needs to eat
other things to survive; it cannot make its own energy through photosynthesis like plants can. Instead of
cellular respiration which requires oxygen, yeast cells go through a process called fermentation to
produce energy. There are two kinds of fermentation: alcoholic fermentation and lactic acid fermentation.
Yeast cells go through alcoholic fermentation, taking the pyruvate molecules produced during glycolysis
and turning it into carbon dioxide and ethanol. The process of alcoholic fermentation is used in many food
preparation processes.
Materials
5 100ml flasks
Yeast
Water

Sugar (sucrose)
Flour
5 balloons (same size)

Hot plate
Stirring rod
2 Funnels

Procedure
1. Retrieve five clean flasks. Label them 1 to 5. As you add reactants to each flask, add it to the label.
2. Pour 100g of water in each flask.
3. Add 100g of yeast to flask 1, flask 2, flask 3, and flask 5.
4. Add 30g of sucrose to flask 2, flask 3, and flask 4.
5. Add 30g of flour to flask 5.
6. Gently swirl each flask to mix the solution.
7. Place flask 3 on the hotplate and set to medium heat. Heat until the solution boils, STIRRING
CONSTANTLY. Take the flask off the heat.
8. Carefully attach a balloon to the top of each flask and tape it in place.
9. Leave your flasks in a warm (but not hot) place. Wait for 24 hours then make your observations.
Pre-lab Questions
1) Is the fermentation process aerobic or anaerobic? What does that mean?
2) What are the two types of fermentation? What organisms go through each type?
3) Which type of fermentation will be taking place in this lab?
4) What will you use as an indication that fermentation is occurring?
5) What are some advantages of fermentation over cellular respiration?
Post-lab Questions
1) Which flasks were your controls?
2) Why did you use two different funnels?
3) In which flasks did fermentation take place? How do you know?
4) What gas is produced during the alcoholic fermentation process?
5) The fermentation process is used a lot in the preparation of food. Name tree different foods that take
advantage of this process.
6) What do you think would happen if you heated up the yeast solution? Why would you need to monitor
the temperature closely if you did this?
7) What are possible sources of error in the lab? What factors could have affected the rates of
fermentation?
8) If you wanted to do this lab and collect more detailed data about the amount of gas produced, how
could you measure the amount of gas? (What method or instrument could you use?)
9) What do the conditions you used in this experiment suggest about what environment yeast cells live in?