I am about to start an experiment to keep me busy this weekend and I need a way to kill of yeast. Obviously there are many extreme ways to do this, bleach, nuclear warhead, hot flame among others, but I would like to use something more specific to organisms such as antibiotics.

 

Would antibiotics be effective against yeast even though yeast is non-pathogenic? I would imagine it would have some effect.

 

In any case, thanks for the help. I hope this project can stave off the Bordom demons and give me some insight into how microbes function.

there are certain chemicals that do a good job killing yeast... is that what you had in mind?

Heat kills yeast by denaturing its enzymes thus renderind it useless. Also a high or low Ph would do the same thing

 

If you could engineer an anti-body to attack and kill the yeast cells that would certainly stop them from working but thats probably way beond anything you could do for an experiment.

 

Cheers,

 

Ryan Jones

Monistat 7 and various other commerical yeast-infection treatements should do the trick.

 

If you could engineer an anti-body to attack and kill the yeast cells that would certainly stop them from working but thats probably way beond anything you could do for an experiment.

 

Wouldn't I love that? But that's way beyond the scale of a weekend project. That'd be interesting to do as a long-term project but I'm already entering a science fair so that might overload me.

 

Monistat 7 and various other commerical yeast-infection treatements should do the trick.

 

Thanks, I was wondering if yeast-infection medicines would work but I was worrried the "yeast" was slightly different. I'll go pick up some Monistat or similar item, which will be quite a buy considering I'm a guy.

lol, have fun gettin' that...

 

there are certain chemicals that do a good job killing yeast... is that what you had in mind?

 

 

Sorry I didn't reply earlier to this, I didn't see it. Yes, anything like that. Actually chemicals would be good, if there is a chance that it wouldn't obliterate them, i.e. not kill them so well its not funny; give the yeast a fighting chance.

 

In any case, does anyone know any other potential methods in case I want to try a few ways, besides monitstat and the chemicals? The other question remains, too: would any antibiotic or antibacterial work?

Arent yeast infections not actually due to yeast....

i thought it was the smell

In your scenario, it sounds like you want to kill yeast without killing other organisms. Or you want to kill yeast in a particularly interesting way. I can recommend both; I just don't know what you want.

pure Alcohol should kill yeast quite effectively, when yeast is used in brewing wine, it dies naturaly when the alcohol level gets to a certain concentration.

so using pure alc will certainly kill even the hardiest of yeasts.

Thanks, alcohol sounds good but it seems too good, for my project I need to give the yeast a chance to fight whatever I'm using, that's why I wanted to use antibacterials.

It might be interesting to experiment with osmosis using a salt solution and pure water and then view the result under a microscope.

That's an interesting follow up, how would I do that? Just add the salt water and pure water and view the osmosis?

That's the way I would go about it, add either or. The salt should cause them to shrivel and the water should cause them to bulge. Here's an interesting page on osmosis:

http://arbl.cvmbs.colostate.edu/hbooks/cmb/cells/pmemb/osmosis.html

Ok, so you specifically want to kill yeast. You can use the eukaryotic equivalents of antibiotics, things like cycloheximide and colchicine. Of course, the resistance rate is going to be much lower than bacterial antibiotic resistance rates since eukaryotes are far more complex.

Yeast is a fungus. How would antibiotics do anything?