Tryptophan Memes

The biochemistry exam flashbacks are REAL! This meme perfectly captures the trauma of being ambushed by metabolic pathway questions. The UN peacekeepers are literally holding students hostage until they regurgitate impossibly complex conversion pathways that even practicing biochemists would need to look up. Converting tryptophan to glucose? That's gluconeogenesis from an amino acid—a multi-step nightmare involving deamination, kynurenine pathway intermediates, and eventually pyruvate formation before even starting the actual glucose synthesis. No wonder the stick figure is having an existential crisis! And don't even mention cholesterol biosynthesis with its 30+ steps starting from acetyl-CoA. Biochemistry students worldwide just felt a collective shudder.