Wine yeast experiment

[Rigel]

I was going to conduct an experiment on wine yeast, but i don't know what is suitable to test on wine yeast based on a biology aspect. I thought of testing the activity of yeast under different temperatures, but that's too simple and my report write up needs to be really long...Does anyone know a good topic that requires some research?
Thx a lot

[MrMistery]

well, wine yeast, or Sacharomyces elipsoideus(i probably spelled it wrongly) is a fungus that is a facultative anaerobe. When oxygen is absent it turnes the glucose in grape juice into alcohol. However, it is inhibited by the alcohol it produces, reason why wine is only 12% alcohol.
I don't know what your paper needs to be like. Maybe you can make more experiments about this fungus in the same paper to fill all that space.

[Rigel]

I dont think i can do several experiments and put them in one paper. But do you think manipulating the population would be a good lab? I mean like if i put a lot of yeast, and let all the sugar be consumed, they would die right? Or if the amount of ethanol is too high and they can't handle it themselves, the population would also go down. This is sort of like a ecology topic isnt it?
Is there any significant effect of salt and vitamins on wine yeast?

[Terry K.]

well, you could test the same experiment you were doing, only use it to find the temperature optimum of the population growth on the wine yeast. That experiment would take a lot of set up, in my opinion, but I believe that you could write a 20 page paper on the results and some possible explanations for the results, like if there were any unpure resources you used and so on.

[mkwaje]

The population of the yeast would naturally decline once they're using up sugar and its in anearobic condition. Otherwise, if you just use cotton plugged flasks, they would just probably multiply a lot. You can make starter cultures this way. After you have enough yeast, transfer them to fresh media with a bung set-up (useful in monitoring CO2 production too). You can probably use different sugar and see differences in rate of fermentation. You can take samples during a week long incubation to check for population decline or measure the ethanol content and plot it together with yeast count. Well, those are sjust suggestions. It really depend on the availability of materials and the curiosity in you.. Good luck.

[vodka]

probably a simple experiment in case you have a GC is to determine the effect of aeration/aerating/shaking on vinegar production during wine fermentation.