Sweetness Lab

     The purpose of this lab was to find how the structure of a carbohydrate changes how it tastes. So the question for this lab was, "How does the structure of a carbohydrate affect its taste (sweetness)?" So, my hypothesis was, "If fructose is tasted, it will be very sweet because it is a monosaccharide. On my data table, which was filled out after the taste test, has the sweetness level of fructose at 150, which was 50 points higher than the second-most sweet substance, which was sucrose at 100. In fact, the sweetness level of monosaccharides were higher than that of disaccharides and polysaccharides. The polysaccharides were the least sweet of the group and were rated at an average of 20 on the sweetness scale. Disaccharides however, were much sweeter, but still on the low side, at an average of 65. As the saccharides gained more rings they became less and less sweeter. It's possible that more rings on the sugar cause the sugar to be less sweet. The sugars, as they got more complex, got less sweet. All of this evidence supports my claim because monosaccharides are the sweetest out of all the different sugars tested in this experiment. All of the other sugars were not as sweet and some, like cellulose and starch, were not sweet at all, and tasted more bitter. All in all, fructose was the sweetest because it is a monosaccharide.
     The saccharides with less rings are more likely to be used for energy. The polysaccharides are used for structure in organisms and can also store energy. The disaccharides in the middle of the group can be in both food for energy and structure in the body of an organism. The monosaccharides are produced as the result of photosynthesis. Different saccharides with different structures serve different purposes.
     Not all testers put the same rating for each sugar. One reason for that could be that people didn't discuss and agree on one rating. Also, a mistake could have been made in placing the sugars on the paper. For example, two sugars could have mixed. Lastly, all people taste things differently, so one person wouldn't taste something the exact same way another person did. According to the U.S. National Library of Medicine, taste can be determined by a variety of different factors (texture, temperature, smell, etc.). Of course, these factors will not be the same for every single taster in this lab. Also, different peoples' taste bud sense different things and send different signals to the brain. This is why one taster could rank the sweetness of different sugars differently than others.