• Metabolic Pathway: It's like a relay race! Imagine a series of chemical reactions, each passing the baton (or molecule) to the next.
• Cells = Tiny Chemical Factories 🏭. They can do a TON of chemical reactions thanks to the help of specialized proteins called enzymes.

🤓 Real-world analogy: Think of enzymes as construction workers who specialize in one task. Just like you wouldn’t ask a bricklayer to do the electrical wiring, each enzyme has a specific job.

• Instead of a massive jump, big chemical transformations in cells happen in sequences of tiny steps.

🎉 Fun Fact: It's like baking a cake! You don't just throw all ingredients into an oven. Instead, you mix them in the right order to get that delicious end result. 🍰

• Glycolysis: It’s all about splitting glucose to get pyruvate.
• Total steps: 9 (each with its own enzyme BFF).
• Name Decode: Glyco = glucose + lysis = splitting.

🤓 Real-world example: Imagine glucose as a long toy train. Glycolysis is like taking it apart, car by car, until you get smaller toy parts (like pyruvate).

⭐ Bonus Point: In one unique step, a six-carbon sugar train gets split into two different three-carbon sugar cars. One car then transforms to match the other one. That’s like turning a boxcar into a passenger car!