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I have 10 samples of some food or other things and I need to know, if it contains amylase. I already ran an experiment with storch and iodine, but I have to make it right and my experiment must not be right.

List of samples:

Thank you very much!

Serpentes
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  • What was the problem with your experiments? You can't trust your results, why? – Teige Feb 08 '15 at 01:38
  • Because I dont know if I did it right. And for example potato peel colored something between iodine without starch and iodine with starch. – Serpentes Feb 08 '15 at 13:22
  • This sounds like a piece of homework. An important thing to learn in science is that you have to take the results for what they are - though the experiments should be arranged so that they could convince you i.e. repeating 3 times or something similar. Negative and positive controls are used to test whether you did it right. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_control#Negative – Teige Feb 09 '15 at 11:24
  • you can also compare your results with that of your fellow students to improve reliablity and eliminate subjective bias – One Face Feb 09 '15 at 13:57

1 Answers1

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Amylase is an enzyme that breaks down starches to simpler sugars. Only living organisms can produce amylase. Animals produce only alpha-amylase. Plants, bacteria, and fungi produce both beta- and alpha- amylases. Like all proteins, the presence of amylase in food depends on if it is permanently denatured by high enough temperatures or extremes in pH. Interestingly, amylases can be classified into high/intermediate/low thermostability groups, depending on whether they become inactivated at a certain temperature. Taking this into consideration, saliva would definitely have alpha-amylase. Bread and biscuits may have alpha or beta amylase (depending on baking temperatures/pH, if amylase was added at all, and if it comes from a grain). Of the rest of your list, banana, corn, milk, and sweet potato would have amylase. Honey (not listed) would also have it. Tomato seems to amylase activity as well. For ketchup, it seems to be an added ingredient to speed processing.

Sources:

Anne
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    but yeast zymase is not amylase? – One Face Feb 08 '15 at 04:03
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    @CRags, yes you are right! yeast can make amylase too though, I believe, but zymase is the more active enzyme in yeast. bad example then on my part. – Anne Feb 08 '15 at 05:17
  • I didn't know yeast can make amylase. Thanks for the info. Thinking on banana, it makes sense if amylase is present in it (as it's sweet, it must have a lot of glucose). – One Face Feb 08 '15 at 05:40