Amylase
Chips starch into sugars. Starts in your mouth.
Workbench
- Works on
- Starch
- Leaves
- Maltose and other short sugars
- Made by
- Your salivary glands and your pancreas.
- Works in
- Saliva, then the small intestine (from the pancreas).
- Sound
- CHIP!
On the bench
Amylase (Pickaxe)
A stretch of starch: glucose, glucose, glucose…
Pick a link and cut it with the pickaxe.
How it works
Starch is glucose packed into long chains. It’s how potatoes, rice, beans and wheat store energy.
Amylase in your saliva starts chipping as you chew, which is why bread tastes sweeter the longer you chew it. Stomach acid mostly shuts it down; amylase from the pancreas picks the job back up in the small intestine. It leaves two-glucose pieces (maltose), and the lining’s own tools split those into single glucose.
AnnouncerWear a hard hat. The pickaxe is purely decorative, but so is the hat.
Amylase starts in your mouth. Chew bread long enough and it starts to taste sweet.
Toast
Root veg
Beans
The rest of the kit
Protease
Lactase
Alpha-galactosidase
Bromelain
PapainSome food has no tool at all. That’s the buffet.
Coming up next on Channel GG
Lipase
Slices fats into fatty acids.
