Start Here: How to Read This Library Without Getting Lost

How This Works

The library is organised by compound, which is useful once you know what you are looking for and unhelpful before that. This page is a reading order instead — five steps, each building on the one before.

The shape of it, in plain language: learning this field is like learning to read a map. First you need to know what the symbols mean — that is the vocabulary. Then you need to understand the terrain the map describes. Then you can find any particular place on it. Most people start by trying to find one place, get lost in the symbols, and give up. So start with the symbols.

Step One: The Building Blocks

Read: What Are Peptides? — 8 minutes. The foundational guide, and the one to read before anything else. What a peptide is, the Cold War origin story, how bioregulators differ from signalling peptides, and why the field looks the way it does. Almost every other page in this library assumes it.

Then: What Are Amino Acids? — 4 minutes. The layer underneath. It explains the ladder — amino acid, peptide, polypeptide, protein — with a Lego analogy. Read it second if the building blocks are new to you, or first if you would rather start from the ground up. If you only ever read two pages, read these two.

Step Two: The Vocabulary

Read: How Peptides Are Named — 6 minutes. Why BPC-157, GHK-Cu and PE-22-28 look like nonsense until you know the five naming conventions. After this the names stop being obstacles and start carrying information.

Keep open: The Glossary. Thirty-four terms in plain English. Not a read-through — somewhere to check a word when you hit one. Lyophilised, secretagogue, agonist, in vitro.

Step Three: How to Judge What You Read

Read: How to Read Peptide Research — 9 minutes. This is the one that changes how you read everything else, including our own pages. Four questions that separate a real finding from a headline: was it cells, animals or people; how many; compared against what; and did anyone independently repeat it.

Then: What Half-Life Actually Means — 7 minutes. One number appears on nearly every compound page and is misread more often than any other. Understanding it explains why some compounds are dosed weekly and others daily, and why that has nothing to do with how strong they are.

Step Four: The Landscape

You now have the vocabulary and the judgement. This step is about the terrain — the families compounds fall into and how they relate.

A Century of Peptide Science — 8 minutes. From secretin in 1902 to the triple agonists. Gives every compound a place in a bigger story.

The Bioregulator Family — 10 minutes. The Khavinson system, one peptide per organ, and an honest account of where its evidence actually stands.

Then pick whichever comparison matches your interest: metabolic, growth hormone, melanocortin, cognitive, or bioregulator. The comparison guides teach a category faster than individual pages, because the differences are what make each compound make sense.

Step Five: The Practical Side

Two guides worth having read before handling anything, whatever your research interest.

How Long Do Peptides Last? — shelf life and storage for powder and reconstituted material, what actually degrades a peptide, and why printed dates are deliberately conservative.

How to Read a Certificate of Analysis — what HPLC purity and mass spectrometry results mean, and how to check a COA against the batch you actually hold. This is the one that lets you assess any supplier, including us.

Frequently Asked Questions

Published References