After hearing about the health benefits of drinking a daily glass of wine, you decide to do a little research on some of the wineries here in the United States.  After a few hours, you discover that our nation’s second largest wine producer, Washington State turns out 58 million liters of wine per year.  Knowing that one of the main ingredients in wine is yeast, you decide to do a few calculations in order to see how long it would take a single yeast cell (V=0.05µL) to reproduce (generation time=30minutes) and fill a bottle the size of Washington’s yearly wine output (58million liters).  How long would it take?

·        Answer: (2^x)(0.05µL)=58million L

                    2^x=1.16e18

                        x=60 reproductions

                               (35minutes)(60reproductions)

                                =35hours

When would the bottle be half-full?

·        35hrs-35min= 34hrs 25mins

 Sources

• Journals

             Arnold, W. N. 2000. From cannon balls to yeast cells. Science 288:55

             The researcher in this paper talks about the difficulties of  measuring a single yeast cell, because they increase in size before they reproduce.  To solve this problem he applies some mathematical formulas that were used to measure cannon balls to determine a single yeast cell’s size with a degree of precision to the nearest  0.000001µL

• Books

             Tortora, G. 2002. Microbiology (336-342)

             This is the microbiology textbook for BIOL 2113 here at the University of  Arkansas.  I found the generation times for various yeasts from this book 

• WWW Resources

 Washington Wine Commission. Retrieved on June 21, 2006. http://washingtonwine.org/sub_page.cfm?action=showfeature&story=num.cfm&... -

             This site gives current information about wineries in the state of Washington, and I used it to get the amount of wine produced by Washington per year.