MCAT Mnemonics: Glycolysis Intermediates

Ken Tao is the MedSchoolCoach expert on MCAT, and will help you remember glycolysis intermediates with the word trick: Girls get fine food; Gentlemen dine girls; Boys prefer to pick up pepperoni pizza. Learn what that means!

Full Transcription

Welcome back to another MCAT Mnemonic Monday. My name is Ken and I’m an MCAT expert with MedSchoolCoach. Today, we have a biochemistry mnemonic on the intermediates of glycolysis.

Glycolysis is an extremely important biochemical pathway that you really, really need to know for the exam. Here, we’ve outlined the 10 steps of glycolysis. You are responsible for the names of all the intermediates of these steps. We’ll go ahead and walk through them briefly.

First, you start with glucose. Glucose is phosphorylated to form glucose 6-phosphate which is then isomerized to fructose 6-phosphate which is phosphorylated again to form fructose 1,6-bisphosphate.

Fructose 1,6-bisphosphate is then split into two, three carbon sugars: glyceraldehyde 3 phosphate, G3P, and dihydroxyacetone phosphate (DHAP). Dihydroxyacetone phosphate is then also converted to glyceraldehyde 3 phosphate so we end up with two molecules of G3P.

G3P is then phosphorylated to form 1 3-bisphosphoglycerate that is then converted to 3-phosphoglycerate and then 2-phosphoglycerate and then phosphoenolpyruvate, and finally two pyruvate.

So alot of molecules here, and a lot of names. So this mnemoic is gonna be very helpful for you. The mnemonic has three parts.

First is: Girls get fine food. So you can see here: Girls get fine food. That for the first four molecules.

Next we have: Gentlemen dine girls. Gentlemen dine girls. Notably, gentlemen dine refers to the two products that you form when you split fructose 1,6-bisphosphate into two smaller sugars.

Finally we have: Boys prefer to pick up pepperoni pizza. Note that “to” and “up” aren’t part of the mnemonic. They’re just there to help fill in the sentence. So we can see here: Boys prefer to pickup pepperoni pizza.

So that’s their mnemonic for memorizing the intermediates of glycolysis.