Sweetness Lab

In this lab we asked the question, How does the structure of a carbohydrate affect its taste or sweetness? We found out that polysaccharides were the least sweet, and monosaccharides were the sweetest, and disaccharides were in between the two. When we collected data on the sweetness of each carbohydrate, glucose, fructose, and sucrose had the highest degree of sweetness, and starch and cellulose had no sweetness. In the vodcast, we learned about the types of carbohydrates and how each had a different number of rings, so depending on the amount of rings maybe the sweetness would be either sweet or not sweet. This data supports our claim because when we finished recording our data we noticed that monosaccharides were sweeter except for sucrose which was a disaccharide. 

The carbohydrate structure shape might affect how they are used by cell/organisms, because of what the carbohydrate consists of and what they are used for. The testers in my group gave similar ratings for each sample in the lab. One reason why the results could've been different is that people taste things different than others do, and another reason could be the amount of the carbohydrate that the person put on their tongue, and if the person still had the taste of the previous carbohydrate in their mouth. 

According to How Stuff Works, the tongue tastes due to taste buds, which contains gustatory receptor cells that respond to different tastes such as things that are bitter, sweet, and salty. When the gustatory cells activate, it sends a electrical impulse to a region in the cerebral cortex, and then the brain interprets it as a taste. The tasters could have ranked the sweetness of the samples differently because of how their gustatory cells react to the taste of the thing that they ate.