Science Buddies: "Ask an Expert"

Can you use a glucose to meter to test the amount of sugar in ten different varieties of apples? Will there be a significant difference between the varieties of apples? i want to see if one apple is actually sweeter than another from the same orchard...the same growing environment, but different variety

Hello threegirlsmom,

A glucose meter of the type used for at-home blood glucose monitoring should work for testing apples.
You might need to test juice made from your apple sample as the glucose meter may only work for liquids. And you may need to dilute your juice samples to get the glucose concentrations to levels within the range measured by your meter.

After a little searching I found an article that quoted a glucose concentration range of 9.3 to 32.2 g/L for juice from different apple varieties.

http://link.springer.com/article/10.100 ... 5-2#page-1

At-home glucose meters for are supposed to be accurate to within 20% for readings above 75 mg/dL.

http://www.diabetesforecast.org/2014/Ja ... -2014.html

So you should be able to see differences in glucose concentration among apple varieties.

As an alternative to the test meter, you could use glucose test strips. A project that uses the test strips is described here:

https://www.sciencebuddies.org/science- ... p049.shtml

A possible advantage of the test strips is that you might not need to make juice from your apple samples for testing. On the other hand, the glucose meter is probably more accurate than the test strips.

I hope this helps and good luck with your project. Please ask again if you have more questions.

A. Norman

Thank you for responding so quickly. My daughter is really interested in doing this, but i wasn't quite sure it would work. Thanks for the additional links. I will let you know what we conclude.