All posts tagged: Peptides

‘People are turning themselves into lab rats’: the injectable peptides craze sweeping the US | Well actually

‘People are turning themselves into lab rats’: the injectable peptides craze sweeping the US | Well actually

Published by Sam Flores

Here’s a new trend that sounds unwise: buying unregulated substances from dealers in foreign countries and injecting them into your body. And yet, grey-market injectable peptides – a category of substances with obscure, alphanumeric names like BPC-157, GHK-Cu, or TB-500 – have developed a devoted following among biohackers and health optimizers. Across platforms like Discord and Telegram, users are claiming these peptides help with everything from injury recovery, athletic performance, weight loss, mental function, better sleep and younger-looking skin. Among the risk-tolerant tech workers of the Bay Area, peptides have become akin to a status symbol. The founders of the startup Superpower store vials of peptides in their office fridge for convenient, lunchtime backside injections, and at least one San Francisco “peptide rave” has seen partygoers entertained by a lab-coated man demonstrating how to inject liquid peptides. What are injectable peptides, exactly? Peptides are short chains of amino acids – smaller versions of proteins – that play a role in regulating hormones, releasing neurotransmitters and repairing tissue, explains Adam Taylor, director of the Clinical Anatomy …

Tiny protein pair discovery could reveal how the genetic code first began

Tiny protein pair discovery could reveal how the genetic code first began

Published by Jenni Sidey

Life runs on instructions you never see. Every cell reads DNA, turns that message into RNA, and then builds proteins that keep you alive. That translation system feels so basic that it is easy to forget it had to begin somewhere. Scientists have long debated how the genetic code took shape, and why it settled into the rules we still share with nearly all living things. A new study from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign argues that part of the answer may be hiding in a surprisingly small place: pairs of amino acids that sit side by side in proteins. These pairs, called dipeptides, appear to carry an ancient signal about how the genetic code emerged and expanded over time. The research links dipeptide patterns to earlier work on transfer RNA and protein building blocks, suggesting the three lines of evidence tell the same evolutionary story. “We find the origin of the genetic code mysteriously linked to the dipeptide composition of a proteome, the collective of proteins in an organism,” said corresponding author Gustavo Caetano-Anollés, …