Amino Acid Phenylalanine Flag: Phe Flag or F Flag

The Phenylalanine flag uses the colours blue, white, and black.  The field has seven white dots to represent the seven carbons on the R-Group.  Usually this amino acid is listed as having nine carbons, but the two carbons on the CONCO stem, since they are all the same. The black field indicates that there is no Nitrogen nor Oxygen in the R-Group.  Along the fly are white and blue vertical stripes.  These stripes indicate the letter F, because the single letter notation for this amino acid is officially F.  The letter F is coded to white and blue, since F is the 6th letter of the alphabet and dark blue (indigo) is the sixth colour of the rainbow.  White is coded to zero, so the vertical stripes read 06, which traces it to sixth letter, F—the one letter symbol for Phenylalanine.  Amino Acid F also has a three letter abbreviation Phe.  Since all four corners of the field have a dot, this indicates that it has ring structure.

Phe was discovered in 1879 by Ernst Schulez who was born in Saxony, Germany.  When Schulez was in Switzerland's Zürich, his team discovered Phenylalanine. Also note the name resembles the amino acid Alanine.  Thus Phenyl-Alanine is simply single Alanine with a Phenyl group attached to it; they could have called it Alaphenyline. You can think of the central dot on the field being the lone Alanine carbon, while the 'six' of dots represents the aromatic ringlike Phenyl part.

Phenylalanine may have made its most famous footnote the public mind during high school biology, if you studied inherited rare genetic diseases.  The genetic disorder associated with Phenylalanine is known as PKU.  Perhaps the most famous person associated with this order is Pearl S. Buck.  Pearl had a daughter who suffered from this affliction.  Basically persons with PKU have an inability to process this amino acid.  After a while it builds up in their system and leads to mental retardation.  Then in 1934 a Norwegian physician Ivar Asbjørn Følling came to understand this disease.   Finally in 1954, Horst Bickel, Evelyn Hickmans and John Gerrard discovered how to treat this disorder with a special diet that did not include Phenylalanine, which lead to recovery and allowed persons born with this inherited genetic disease to stay mentally healthy.  About 30,000 people in the USA have PKU, which means they have a limited diet.  The hard part is, during childhood and adolescence, PKU persons get picked on for not being able to eat 'normal' food.  Most people are aware of people who shouldn't eat Gluten, but PKU people have a more restrictive diet and the consequences for eating standard food is debilitating. Basically PKU people are Obligate Vegans or Natural Herbivores.