GEEK ALERT
Chris O’Donnell pointed me to a website that only chem-geeks could love. Warning- some of the names a just a teensy bit risque’. Pretty funny, though.
My favorite:
Fucitol
Although this sounds like what an undergraduate chemist might exclaim when their synthesis goes wrong, it’s actually an alcohol, whose other names are L-fuc-ol or 1-deoxy-D-galactitol. It gets its wonderful trivial name from the fact that it is derived from the sugar fucose, which comes from a seaweed found in the North Atlantic called Bladderwrack whose latin name is Fucus vesiculosis. Interestingly, there are a few articles in the Journal of Biochemistry throughout 1997 concerning a kinase enzyme which acts on fucose. The creators of these articles were Japanese, and seemed to have missed the fact that fucose kinase should not be abbreviated as ‘fuc-K’.