Sweetness lab

The purpose of this lab was to demonstrate how the the structure of a carbohydrate affects its taste. We thought that the disacchrides would have the highest degree of sweetness. Monosaccharides taste sweet and have one ring, disacchrides also taste sweet but have to rings, and polysacchrides have three rings and taste starchy and plain. For monosacchrides we had lactose and fructose and their degree of sweetness for lactose was 50 and fructose was 90. The dissacharides in this experiment was sucrose and glucose and the degree of sweetness we observed was 100 for sucrose and 95 for glucose. We had many polysacchrides but for one of them, maltose had a degree of sweetness of 25 and for all of them the range was between 0-75. This is evidence that our claim was correct because the dissachrides had 95 and 100, while the others had a range of 0-95.

The molecular structure of carbohydrates like glucose allows for the creation of long strings of monosaccharides into polysaccharides which the cell can use to store excess sugar. In plants they can be used to give cellulose fibers their strength.


All tasters gave different ratings for the different samples. The ratings could be different because everyone has different taste buds. Another reason is that one person might have started with a sweet on and the sweetness might have affected the next sample, while another person might have started with a starchy one and that would have made the next sample taste a little starchy instead of sweet like the first person. Also all people have a different rating on how they think sweet is, like some person might think glucose is 95 and another person might think its 85.

The thing that makes us taste sweetness is when we eat or drink something sweet, it simulates proteins in our sweet-responding cells. And then they send a signal to the brain. A  reason that people could rank sweetness differently, is that some people might have a slow signal sent from the taste buds to the brain or not as strong or many taste buds.

 

Carbohydrate	Type of Carbohydrate	Degree of Sweetness	Color	Texture	Other observations
Sucrose	Disaccharide	100	White	Granular	Taste and looks like sugar
Glucose	Disaccharide	95	White	Granular	Grainy
Fructose	Monosaccharide	90	White	Grainy	Really sweet looks like sugar
Galactose	Polysaccharide	75	White	Powder	Looks like powder sugar
Maltose	Polysaccharide	25	Brown	Chunky	Hard chunks
Lactose	Monosaccharide	50	White	Har, powdery	Hard, compressed powder
Starch	Polysaccharide	0	White	Powder	Powder the sticky, thick
Cellulose	Polysaccharide	5	WHite	Powder	Powdery looks like powder sugar