Biofuel

Lately, people are trying to develop more environmentally friendly fuels. Biofuels are fuels made out of organisms that have been genetically modified. We are performing a lab that will test the effectiveness of a certain biofuel. We are testing it by adding it to a strong base at various increments of time. The strong base will react with it and cause it to turn yellow, so, the more yellow the beaker the more energy is in that beaker. Depending on how long it takes to become a dark yellow we will know how effective this biofuel really is. Also on the second day, we will grind up a mushroom, a decomposer, and add it to the solution. This should speed up the reaction time because of its enzymes. Our group predicted that the amount of glucose in solution will increase until a certain point when the reaction will run out of reactants and stop.

Breaking down cellulose is fairly simple as demonstrated in these steps: First we add cellobiase to the cellulose which breaks apart the cellobiose that is made up of 2 glucose molecules. The 2 glucose molecules can then be used as fuel. We will be testing how efficient this reaction is. We will do this by adding .5 mL of the created solution to .5 Ml of p-nitrophenol which will stop the reaction and change the glucose to a yellow color allowing us to easily determine how much glucose has been produced.

The results of the reaction appear to prove our hypothesis. The solution appeared darker in the 2 minute tube than it was in the 1 minute tube. However, after that the increase in color was miniscule if there was any at all. This could be for two reasons, either we didn't add enough p-nitrophenol or the reaction had actually slowed to an almost complete stop.