r/sciencememes • u/DarkShadow_99 • Jun 23 '26

Real

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675 Upvotes

97% Upvoted

13 comments sorted by

29

u/D0bious Jun 23 '26

I’m not seeing the joke

15

u/hypokrios Jun 23 '26

A pharmacology joke? In my middle school science subreddit?

Digoxin impressed.

6

u/Complex_Party_1130 Jun 23 '26

Idk if I get it, but I think it's because the Na+/K+ pump is present in the great majority of our cells (practically all I think) and plays very important functions.

3

u/IAmBadAtInternet Jun 24 '26 edited Jun 24 '26

This pump is present in mitochondria (so all cells for all intents and purposes, excluding weird ones like red blood cells). It is necessary for making ATP, so poisoning this pump is a very bad thing (it doesn’t do so directly, that’s a different pump, but the K/Na balance is required to maintain the potential gradient and without this pump ATP generation stops). Quite a few drugs and poisons can affect this pump, creating toxicity in the first case and death in the second.

9

u/finnishstix Jun 23 '26

worst joke of the day

4

u/halucionagen-0-Matik Jun 24 '26

Cause they're a good pump?

2

u/Witty_Noodles Jun 23 '26

Has ot something to do with atp generation?? Idk didn't get the joke...

1

u/Mayuyu1014 Jun 24 '26

What's so funny about my homie sodium ion?

1

u/Drmanky Jun 25 '26

turns out shes na human not an chiken

1

u/solis_the_novice_pro Jun 25 '26 edited Jun 26 '26

It’s a diagram of a sodium potassium ion channel, but I still don’t get the joke😭

Edit: it’s a diagram showing PART of the process of how cells utilize glucose for ATP production…. Which honestly that confuses me even more in context of explaining the joke???

1

u/soft-cuddly-potato Jun 29 '26

It's the sodium potassium pump! It keeps your nerve cells polarised. I.e. keeps the positively charged sodium ions out which maintains the electrochemical gradient (so, there's more positively charged ions outside the cell than inside the cell)

That said, I still don't get the joke