Amino Acid Tryptophan Flag: W Flag or Trp

Happy Thanksgiving.  It's the most popular amino acid of the them all: Tryptophan.  Today several million Americans will invoke the name of Amino Acid W, better known Tryptophan.  It will be name dropped on the television news today.  Yet, very few will remember that it is only one of 21 other amino acids that will be consumed today.

The flag for Tryptophan uses the colours orange, yellow, white, and blue.  It fills up the square field completely and harmoniously.  There are 9 carbons in the R-Group, thus there are 9 white dots.  The field is blue because the R-Group contains a nitrogen.

Along the hoist is an orange and yellow stripe that refers to one letter abbreviation for this amino acid: W.  Orange is coded to 2 and yellow is coded to 3 in colour metrics, because orange is the 2nd colour and yellow is the 3 colour of the common spectrum.  Together these number make 23 and W is the 23rd letter of the alphabet.

Freddy Hopkins discovered this famous Turkey Day amino acid in 1901.  Fred was from the UK.