How sugar type affects the rise of wheat bread dough due to the rate

of respiration of baker’s yeast buds

Introduction

I love cooking and baking as a hobby. As a profession, post-education, I would like to either
go into the stream of bioengineering or culinary arts. Therefore, when I was given full
creative power to choose my topic in my biology project, I decided to meld biology with my
love for cooking into an experiment. In a class or the laboratory, we usually do yeast
experiments with glucose/dextrose(C6H12O6), however, in baking, we tend to use
confectionary sugar (sucrose, C12H22O11).

This made me wonder how different types of monosaccharide and disaccharide sugars
affect the rate and amount of respiration done by the baker’s yeast aka. S. cerevisiae in
bread dough. Since most commonly found household sweeteners tend to be sucrose and
maximum efficiency is not a very large concern for your average home baker, this
experiment is going to be more for professional bakers. I have limited the time of this
experiment to an hour because 45 minutes - an hour is the recommended amount of time
for the bread dough to rest and rise as per most recipes.

Research done beforehand

The aforementioned experiment is going to entail the observation of changes made in the
rise of dough by introducing no sugar, glucose, sucrose and lactose in a wheat dough
containing common baker’s yeast (S. cerevisiae).

Yeast is a single-celled eukaryotic member of the kingdom Fungi. Its ability to respire
anaerobically using glucose and other available sugars to produce ethanol and carbon
dioxide at a relatively cheap price makes it an ideal leavening agent in food processes like
alcoholic beverage brewing and breadmaking.

A leavening agent is a substance that causes the dough to increase in volume due to the
release of gases within the dough [The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica, 2019]. A
leavening agent, in the context of baking, takes the form of baker's yeast, baking powder
and baking soda.
Before the discovery of using yeast in baking, bread tended to be flat, hard and brittle. The
oldest recorded use of yeast in bread-making seems to be in Ancient Egypt 300 B.C.
[Lohman, S. 2019(2018)]. However, it was not properly studied until the first microscope
with a powerful enough magnification to view single cells was made in 1676 by Antony Van
Leeuwenhoek [Wills, M, 2018], and Louis Pasteur's discovery of how yeast function in 1859,
that yeast was commercialised to be used commonly in bread-making practices.

The leavening abilities of the yeast are mainly due to its anaerobic respiration properties.
The process primarily starts with aerobic respiration as doughs have dissolved oxygen in
them, using the following formula to use up the sugars in the dough

C6H12O6 → 6CO2 + 6H₂O

However, this aerobic respiration does not last for long as the oxygen dissolved soon
depletes, causing the yeast to slowly switch to an anaerobic form of respiration. This is
where our main rising of dough happens. At this stage, the yeast produces carbon dioxide
and ethanol in the absence of oxygen. The reaction goes as follows

C6H12O6 → 2CO2 + C2H5OH

Yeast requires glucose to undergo any respiration process. Through glycolysis, it reduces
glucose to pyruvate. However, once no oxygen is available to act as the final electron
acceptor in the ETC (electron transfer chain), it begins respiring anaerobically. It reduces
glucose to pyruvate through glycolysis. As no oxygen is present, it cannot proceed to the
link reaction and Kreb's cycle and the ETC does not flow [Khan Academy]. As the process
stops at glycolysis, the NADH produced in glycolysis is not regenerated into NAD +. Hence, to
ensure that glycolysis continues, the yeast must then carry out a series of extra reactions,
known as fermentation [Fowler, Roush & Wise, 2013]. The pyruvate produced from
glycolysis loses a carboxyl group, and carbon dioxide is released and becomes
acetaldehyde, which is then reduced by NADH to ethanol [Fowler, Roush & Wise, 2013].
This regenerates the NAD* required to oxidise glucose in glycolysis.
Fig. Alcohol fermentation in Yeast [Alcohol fermentation in Yeast diagram by Baydaa A. Hassan
ResearchGate]

Although glucose is the most efficient chemical as it can immediately be fed into the
glycolysis pathway, the yeast can also utilise other monosaccharides and disaccharides by
the means of breaking them down into glucose then putting that converted glucose into the
glycolysis pathway. In this experiment, the beforementioned disaccharides will be sucrose
and lactose sugar.

Sucrose being a disaccharide, the yeast requires the breakdown of it into its
monosaccharides, namely, glucose and galactose. It does this by the means of sucrase
(invertase). The galactose then follows the Leloir pathway, which results in the galactose
being converted into a form of glucose that is able to undergo glycolysis.

This also means that theoretically, if the same initial concentration of glucose and sucrose is
used, sucrose as a substrate would lead to a higher respiration rate as the breakdown of
sucrose results in double the concentration of glucose. However, this is just a theory that
needs to be tested in the real-life experiments coming up.

On the other hand, lactose is going to be an interesting substrate as wild S. cerevisiae lacks
the metabolic capability to metabolise lactose into glucose. Although, due to lactose being
the main component of dairy products that are often used with yeast, most of the
commonly available packages of baker’s yeast tend to be a strain that had the genes of
other lactose metabolising capable forms of yeast like Kluyveromyces lactis cut and edited
into its own genome. Unlike the wild strain, this commercial variety of yeast has the ability
to metabolise lactose into glucose and galactose, which S. cerevisiae is able to naturally
use.

Please note. This gene for lactose metabolization is only expressed after S. cerevisiae is
exposed to lactose, after which the cell begins producing enzymes for metabolising lactose.
Therefore, it is highly probable that the primary uptake of the lactose metabolism shall be
rather slow and then linearly increase as the yeast gets more mechanisms to break down to
lactose into its constituent monosaccharides.
Variables in the experiment

Dependent variable ∆ vol of dough per time interval

Independent variable
Other Controlled variables
Sugar types (dextrose, sucrose, lactose)/or
lack of it
Composition of dough
M of dough (20g)
Vol of sugar soln. (2ml)
Conc of sugar soln (7%)
Type of yeast
Type of rising container
Temp (approx. 30 degrees)
Time intervals for checking (5 mins)

Methodology

Apparatus required
In no specific order: -

 1kg of wheat flour

 8 teaspoons of instant dry baker’s yeast (10g approx.)
 1l water (35-40 degrees C)
 1 tbsp dextrose/glucose
 1 tbsp sucrose
 1 tbsp lactose
 20 identical rectangular/square containers
 Damp sanitary paper/cloth towels (treated in a hot oven beforehand to sterilise)
 Measuring apparatus
o 3x sterilised tablespoons
o 1x 500 ml sterilised measuring cylinder
o 1x Food thermometer sterilised
o 4x Stirring rod
o 1x Glass marker
 4 sterilised rubber spatulas
 Electronic weighing machine
Procedure

1. Divide 1kg wheat flour into 4 equal parts by weight

2. Label each batch of wheat by the type of yeast solution you’re going to add into it
(i.e., batch with no sugar yeast gets marked batch 1 and so on)
3. No sugar for batch 1, 1 tbsp of powdered dextrose for control batch (batch 2), 1 tbsp
powdered sucrose for batch 3, 1 tbsp of powdered lactose for batch 4(for reference
and accurate experiment, 1tbsp is 15ml)
4. Divide 10 g instant dry yeast into 4 batches of 2.5 g each
5. Add each batch of yeast into individual containers
6. Label each batch of yeast by the type of sugar you’re going to add into it (i.e., batch
with no sugar gets marked batch 1 and so on)
7. Add 250 ml of warm water (35-40 degrees C) to each batch by measuring it out with
our 500 ml measuring cylinder
8. Add the sugars to their respective batches and no sugar for batch 1
9. Stir lightly with a stirring rod till yeast and sugar has incorporated into the water (use
individual rods for each batch to prevent cross-contamination)
10.Add respective sugar yeast mixtures to their respective batches and knead the flour
with a warmed spatula (1 well-cleaned spatula for each batch to prevent cross-
contamination) till the wet ingredients have been incorporated and the mass
resembles bread dough
11.Prepare 20 small square/rectangular containers and label them as follows
a. 5x batch 1
b. 5x batch 2
c. 5x batch 3
d. 5x batch 4
12.Divide each of those 4 dough balls into 5 parts by weight and put all 20 balls into the
prepared 20 identical containers on basis of their respective batch numbers.
13.Delicately flatten the dough balls to the bottom of their containers
14.Cover the mouth of the container with a damp paper/cloth towel
15.Put containers in a warm dark place
16.Start the stopwatch
17.Come back every 5 minutes and record changes in height of the dough for an hour.
Log this information along with time in a neatly drawn table to be able to see volume
increase/time
Bibliography
 Materials-

o Dextrose bought in the form of Glucose-D by Dabur (99.4% purity)

o Sucrose from Profoods and lactose bought from amazon in pure forms (99%<)
