MCAT Mnemonics: Krebs Cycle Intermediates

Ken Tao is the MedSchoolCoach expert on MCAT, and will discuss Krebs cycle intermediates, while helping you remember Citrate, Isocitrate, α-Ketoglutarate, Succinyl-COA, Succinate, Fumarate, Malate, and Oxaloacetate with a neat word play.

Full Transcription

All right. Welcome back to another episode of MCAT Mnemonic Monday. I’m Ken and I’m an MCAT expert with MedicalSchoolCoach. Today, we’ve got a biochemistry mnemonic for you and it’s on the Krebs Cycle Intermediates.

The krebs cycle is also called the citric acid cycle and it’s one of several biochemical pathways that you need to know for the MCAT. Specifically you need to know the names of all the intermediates, the enzymes that catalyze each step of the cycle, and the side products of each step, such as carbon dioxide, NADH, FADH2, and GTP. That’s a lot of information. So today’s mnemonic should help you a lot.

As you can see in this diagram, we have the Krebs cycle and the intermediates. We have citrate, iscitrate, α-ketoglutarate, succinyl-CoA, and succinate, fumarate, malate, and oxaloacetate.

The mnemonic for memorizing the names of the Krebs cycle intermediates is: citrate is krebs special substrate for making oxaloacetate.

We have citrate for citrate.

Is for iscitrate.

Krebs for α-ketoglutarate.

Special for succinyl-CoA.

Substrate for succinate.

For for fumarate.

Making for malate.

And oxaloacetate for oxaloacetate.

So again, the mnemonic is citrate is Krebs special substrate for making oxide low acetate.