Andrew Roos

Hannah White
Nancy Shin
Potato Polysaccharide and Monosaccharide Test

Dates Lab Performed: Thursday 3/9/17 and Friday 3/10/17

Question: Will the addition of amylase affect the amount of starch and sugar in a
potato?

Hypothesis: If we add amylase to a raw, mashed potato, then it will have more sugar
than starch.

The purpose of the lab is to test for starch and sugar in a certain fruit or vegetable. We
tested a potato for starch and sugar without the addition of amylase ( the control). We
crushed up and uncooked potato. This allowed us to extract some of the liquid from the
potato.

Materials:
- potato -Benedicts Solution -Lugol Iodine -amylase

- graduated cylinder -vortex -boiling water container -mortar and pestle

- pippet

Procedure
Sugar (Control):
Mix 2 Milliliters of potato and 2 Milliliters of Benedicts Solution in a test tube.
Place in boiling water bath and record color change.
Green-weak positive
Orange- strong positive
Stays blue- negative
Starch (Control):
Mix 2 Milliliters of potato and .25 Milliliters of Lugol Iodine in a test tube
Gently swirl in a vortex for 45 seconds, record color change.
Dark brown/ black- positive
Light brown- negative
Sugar (Experiment):
 Mix 2 Milliliters of potato, 2 Milliliters of Benedicts Solution, and 2 Milliliters of amylase
in a test tube.
Incubate overnight at room temperature.
Starch (Experiment):
Mix 2 Milliliters of potato, 2 Milliliters of amylase, and .25 Milliliters of Lugol Iodine in a
test tube.
Incubate overnight at room temperature
Gently swirl in a vortex for 45 seconds, record color change.

Results: Monosaccharide Polysaccharide Amylase Amylase

(sugar) (starch) (sugar) (starch)

Color Before the water Before mixing the Before the water Before mixing
Change bath, the color solution in the bath, the color of salvia, Iodine
was light blue. vortex the color the solution was and potato
But after heating was a light light blue. After together the
the solution the brown. But after heating, the color was a
color changed to mixing the color changed to light brown.
an orangey solution it orange. After mixing in
brown. changed color to the vortex the
a dark brown. color changed
to slightly
darker brown.

Positive or Weak Positive Strong Positive Positive Weak Positive

Negative

Analysis:
Before we added the amylase, the tests was a weak positive for monosaccharide and a
strong positive for the polysaccharide test. This showed that there was a lot of starch
and not as much sugar. After we added the amylase, the results switched. The
monosaccharide was a stronger positive than the polysaccharide. This meant that
there was more sugar and less starch. This was because the amylase broke down the
starch and converted it to sugar.

We knew that the tests were positive or negative when the results were specific colors.
A positive test result had a certain color such as orange or dark brown, and the negative
had colors such as green or light brown. The outcome and what the color had to be to
be positive or negative was given, and we had to compare the color of the liquid to the
color given.

Conclusion
We found that our hypothesis of the potato with amylase having more sugar than starch
was correct. We had a few errors in our experiment. One of them being, that the
potatoes oxygenated and changed colors drastically in a short period of time. Also, it
took a lot of time to get the juice out of the potato, making it hard for us to focus on the
actual experiment of adding other solutions and mixing.