The short version of Lyophilisation fits in a sentence. The long version — which is the one that helps — is below.
This page was last updated on 2026-07-30 and is reviewed periodically as new material appears.
Selank is a hydrophilic peptide and dissolves readily in water and in aqueous buffers. The lyophilised powder is typically a white to off-white solid. Because short peptides are prone to hydrolysis and oxidation, handling benefits from limiting exposure to heat, moisture and strong light. Working solutions are commonly prepared in sterile water or saline, and repeated freeze-thaw cycles are avoided to reduce aggregation and loss of activity. These practices reflect general laboratory convention rather than published stability specifications.
Dry powder is normally held at -20 degrees Celsius or lower, in a sealed container with desiccant and protection from light. Reconstituted solutions are usually kept at 2 to 8 degrees Celsius for short periods and frozen for longer ones. Proline residues at several positions are generally associated with some resistance to peptidase attack, but chemical stability still declines at neutral to alkaline pH and at elevated temperature. Exact shelf-life figures are product-specific and are not standardised across suppliers.
Identity and purity are usually assessed by reversed-phase high-performance liquid chromatography, with mass spectrometry used to confirm molecular mass and sequence information. Amino acid analysis and peptide mapping may supplement these methods. Certified reference standards are scarce, and many commercial lots are sold as research chemicals without a pharmacopoeial monograph. Regulatory treatment differs by country: Selank is a registered prescription medicine in Russia, while in the European Union and the United States it is not an approved drug and may fall under research-chemical or unapproved-product frameworks.
Selank is a synthetic heptapeptide with the sequence Thr-Lys-Pro-Arg-Pro-Gly-Pro. Its four N-terminal residues reproduce tuftsin, a tetrapeptide fragment of the immunoglobulin heavy chain, while the C-terminal Pro-Gly-Pro extension is a synthetic addition. The peptide has a molecular mass near 752 daltons and carries a net positive charge at physiological pH because of the arginine and lysine side chains. Published indexes list it under the name Selank and the sequence abbreviation TKPRPGP. Solid-phase peptide synthesis is the standard production route for research quantities.
Development took place at the Institute of Molecular Genetics of the Russian Academy of Sciences, where a series of short peptides were designed in the 1980s and 1990s. Selank was selected from variants of tuftsin that showed resistance to plasma peptidases. Russian regulatory approval covers it as an anxiolytic agent given intranasally. Outside that market the compound is normally handled as a research chemical rather than a medicine, and no widely recognised international pharmacopoeial monograph exists. The name Selank is a coined trade designation rather than a systematic chemical name.
Enzymatic stability motivates the extra three residues at the carboxyl end. Native tuftsin is cleaved quickly by circulating aminopeptidases and carboxypeptidases, which limits its duration of action and its usefulness as a tool compound. Extending the chain with proline-rich segments is a common design tactic because proline constrains the backbone and slows proteolysis. The same Pro-Gly-Pro motif appears in other Russian-developed peptides of the era. Whether the full seven-residue chain is required for activity, or whether it acts mainly as a prodrug releasing tuftsin, remains unresolved.
| Property | Value | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Appearance | White to off-white powder | Lyophilised solid form |
| Solubility class | Freely soluble in water | Hydrophilic heptapeptide |
| Dry storage temperature | -20 degrees Celsius or lower | Sealed, desiccated, protected from light |
| Solution storage | 2 to 8 degrees Celsius short term | Avoid repeated freeze-thaw cycles |
| Common identification method | Reversed-phase HPLC with mass spectrometry | Confirms purity and molecular mass |
Pharmacokinetic data are sparse and largely derived from animal work. After intranasal administration the peptide appears in plasma within minutes, and reported half-lives are short, on the order of minutes to tens of minutes. Degradation proceeds through ordinary proteolytic cleavage into constituent amino acids and smaller fragments. Direct evidence that intact Selank reaches brain tissue in meaningful amounts is limited, and the extent of blood-brain barrier penetration is debated. Some authors argue that fragments, not the parent peptide, carry much of the observed activity.
Published clinical work is concentrated in Russian-language journals and generally involves small samples without independent replication. Systematic reviews in English note the shortage of randomised, placebo-controlled trials and the difficulty of verifying methods from translated reports. Outcome measures vary between studies, which complicates pooling of results. Interest in the compound as a cognitive or anxiolytic agent therefore rests on a thinner evidence base than the volume of citations suggests. Replication in well-powered trials with preregistered endpoints would be needed before firm conclusions about efficacy can be drawn.
Reported pharmacological effects center on reduced anxiety-like behavior in animal models and on measures of memory and learning. Proposed contributing mechanisms include modulation of GABAergic signaling, shifts in monoamine turnover, and changes in the activity of enzymes that degrade neuropeptides. Effects on the expression of genes linked to neuroplasticity have also been described. No single molecular target is widely accepted, and whether the behavioral findings arise from one pathway or several remains an open question.
Selank is a synthetic heptapeptide with the sequence Thr-Lys-Pro-Arg-Pro-Gly-Pro. It was designed as a stabilized analogue of tuftsin, a naturally occurring tetrapeptide fragment derived from the immunoglobulin heavy chain. The additional Pro-Gly-Pro segment at the carboxyl terminus is intended to slow enzymatic cleavage. The compound is usually described in the literature as a synthetic peptide with anxiolytic and cognitive-related activity, a label that reflects a research context rather than an approved therapeutic category.
Most published work on selank originates from a small number of research groups in the Russian Federation. A large share of that record appears in Russian-language journals, which limits access for readers who rely on English-indexed databases. Independent replication by laboratories outside the original research network is sparse in publicly available sources. This concentration of origin and language is a frequently noted feature when the compound is summarized in broader reviews of synthetic peptides.
The use of electron cyclotron resonance (ECR) ion sources for the production of intense beams of highly charged ions has immensely grown over the last decade. ECR ion sources are used as injectors into linear accelerators, Van-de-Graaff generators or cyclotrons in nuclear and elementary particle physics. In atomic and surface physics ECR ion sources deliver intense beams of highly charged ions for collision experiments or for the investigation of surfaces. For the highest charge states, however, Electron beam ion sources (EBIS) are needed. They can generate even bare ions of mid-heavy elements. The Electron beam ion trap (EBIT), based on the same principle, can produce up to bare uranium ions and can be used as an ion source as well.
A herbarium is a collection of preserved plant specimens and associated data used for scientific study. Originally, the word "herbarium" referred to books about medicinal plants. In 1700, French botanist Joseph Pitton de Tournefort used the word to describe a collection of dried plants and Carl Linnaeus continued to use this term in his work which is where the term caught on. Initially, herbarium collections were bound in volumes instead of on individual sheets as it is done today. It is not exactly known how long dry plant specimens last in storage, but with proper conservation, they have been able to last many centuries. Specimens collected by Linnaeus in the eighteenth century and by Banks and Solander on the Endeavour voyage in 1788 are still excellently preserved. The specimens may be whole plants or plant parts. These will usually be dried and pressed and mounted on a sheet of paper but, depending upon the material, may also be stored in boxes or kept in alcohol or other preservatives.
Inner ear barotrauma (IEBt), though much less common than MEBT, shares a similar external cause. Mechanical trauma to the inner ear can lead to varying degrees of conductive and sensorineural hearing loss as well as vertigo. It is also common for conditions affecting the inner ear to result in auditory hypersensitivity. Two possible mechanisms are associated with forced Valsalva manoeuvre. In the one, the Eustachian tube opens in response to the pressure, and a sudden rush of high pressure air into the middle ear causes stapes footplate dislocation and inward rupture of the oval or round window. In the other, the tube remains closed and increased cerebrospinal fluid pressure is transmitted through the cochlea and causes outward rupture of the round window. Inner ear barotrauma can be difficult to distinguish from Inner ear decompression sickness. Both conditions manifest as cochleovestibular symptoms. The similarity of symptoms makes differential diagnosis difficult, which can delay appropriate treatment or lead to inappropriate treatment. Nitrogen narcosis, oxygen toxicity, hypercarbia, and hypoxia can cause disturbances in balance or vertigo, but these appear to be central nervous system effects, not directly related to effects on the vestibular organs. High-pressure nervous syndrome during heliox compression is also a central nervous system dysfunction. Inner ear injuries with lasting effects are usually due to round window ruptures, often associated with Valsalva maneuver or inadequate middle ear equalisation.
Sources: en.wikipedia.org
AlphaFold's predicted structures are widely used in biological research, though the precise scale of that use is difficult to measure. More than 40% of protein-structure papers published in 2023 in Cell, Nature, and Science cited AlphaFold 2. A 2024 bibliometric analysis of the Web of Science database identified 1,680 peer-reviewed papers referencing AlphaFold published between January 2019 and May 2024. Measures of this kind rely on authors citing the AlphaFold papers when they use the tool, a convention encouraged but not enforced by the maintainers of the AlphaFold Protein Structure Database. Attempts to validate these counts against the full text of papers suggest that citations to foundational AlphaFold papers can both overstate and understate how widely the tool is used. In an analysis of about 8,900 papers in the PubMed Central Open Access corpus that mentioned AlphaFold, roughly 30% cited none of three foundational AlphaFold papers, while only about half of the papers citing at least one of those three mentioned AlphaFold anywhere in their text. A smaller manual check of 100 papers from a curated protein-literature database found a similar shortfall, with fewer than half of those mentioning AlphaFold including a formal citation.
Work led by Kabanov has recently shown that some of these polymers, originally thought to be inert carrier molecules, have a very real effect on biological systems independently of the drug they are transporting. The poloxamers have been shown to incorporate into cellular membranes affecting the microviscosity of the membranes. The polymers seem to have the greatest effect when absorbed by the cell as an unimer rather than as a micelle.
== Research == Lasofoxifene is under development by Sermonix Pharmaceuticals for the treatment of metastatic breast cancer and dyspareunia associated with vaginal atrophy in the United States and Europe. It is also being researched for the potential treatment of ovarian cancer. As of December 2017, lasofoxifene is in phase III clinical trials for breast cancer and phase II clinical studies for dyspareunia.
For this reason, certain methods construct a background tree using 16S rRNA sequences which they use as the canonical tree of life. The distance matrix constructed from this tree of life is then subtracted from the distance matrices of the proteins of interest. However, because RNA distance matrices and DNA distance matrices have different scale, presumably because RNA and DNA have different mutation rates, the RNA matrix needs to be rescaled before it can be subtracted from the DNA matrices. By using molecular clock proteins, the scaling coefficient for protein distance/RNA distance can be calculated. This coefficient is used to rescale the RNA matrix.
Sources: en.wikipedia.org
Dry powder is normally held at -20 degrees Celsius or below in a sealed, light-protected container with desiccant. Brief room-temperature handling during weighing is generally tolerated. Storage instructions vary between suppliers, so the accompanying certificate of analysis should be followed.
Reversed-phase HPLC establishes purity, while mass spectrometry confirms the expected molecular mass. Sequence confirmation may use tandem mass spectrometry or peptide mapping. A certificate of analysis typically reports these results alongside the analytical method applied.
In Russia it is a registered medicine available by prescription. In many other countries it is not approved for human use and is supplied only as a research chemical. Import and possession rules differ by jurisdiction, and buyers are responsible for checking local requirements.
Selank is a seven-amino-acid peptide built from the tuftsin sequence plus a Pro-Gly-Pro tail. It is produced by chemical synthesis rather than extracted from a natural source. The free peptide is usually supplied as a lyophilised powder or in an aqueous formulation.