If you don't have committed to memory and immediate recall that "aspartic acid" is a negatively charged amino acid, that has dramatically different chemical pro

If you don't have committed to memory and immediate recall that "aspartic acid" is a negatively charged amino acid, that has dramatically different chemical properties than cysteine, you won't notice something strange is going on when hundreds of amino acids go by your eyes in a BLAST alignment, that you did offhandedly one day: https://bmcbiochem.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1471-2091-15-10 https://bmcbiochem.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1471-2... That's an easy example. Another one: knowing the atomic mass of nickel in a mass spectrogram and explaining a deviation in a MS fragmentation pattern instead of throwing out the data. Another one: Knowing the mechanism of chen-mapp phosphorylation https://www.researchgate.net/publication/7184505_33-Rearrangements_of_Phosphonium_Ylides https://www.researchgate.net/publication/7184505_33-Rearrang... and rescuing an otherwise lost synthesis in a group meeting (not published; the downstream results were not otherwise interesting). Don't discount having raw knowledge at your fingertips.