In depth
Detailed answers on handling, delivery and compliance
Longer explanations behind the short answers above — ordering, cold chain, storage windows and solubility troubleshooting.
Ordering, lot numbers and continuity
Orders are placed through the catalogue and confirmed by email with the lot numbers allocated to your vials. If a study needs continuity across reorders, add the required lot number to the order comments: we fulfil from that batch where stock allows and contact you with the nearest alternative when it has run out, rather than substituting silently. For larger volumes or repeat scheduled supply, the lab team can hold a reserved allocation from a single run so an entire study draws on one analytical record.
Matched batch sets — listed as stacks — exist for the same reason. When a protocol uses three compounds together, sourcing them as a set removes three independent batch variables from the experiment and gives one documentation trail rather than three.
Delivery, packaging and cold chain
Orders confirmed before 3pm on a working day ship the same day, free and tracked, for next-day delivery within the UK. International orders leave the London facility within forty-eight hours on a tracked courier, and transit time then depends on the destination and customs handling.
Lyophilised peptides do not require a cold chain in transit. Freeze-drying removes the water that drives hydrolysis and deamidation, so the solid cake is stable for days at ambient temperature — considerably longer than any tracked service takes. Refrigeration matters on arrival and after reconstitution, not in the van. Vials travel sealed and cushioned in rigid packaging with the batch paperwork enclosed.
Storage temperatures and shelf life
Store sealed lyophilised vials at 2–8°C for routine use, or at −20°C for long-term storage where the material will sit for months. Avoid repeated temperature cycling: moving a vial in and out of a fridge several times a day condenses moisture onto the cake each time, and moisture is what starts the degradation lyophilisation was meant to prevent.
After reconstitution, store at 2–8°C, protected from light, and use within twenty-eight days. That window is set by the benzyl alcohol preservative in bacteriostatic water, which suppresses microbial growth after the septum has been pierced. Plain sterile water has no preservative and gives a single-use vial. If a solution turns cloudy, develops particulates or changes colour, discard it rather than filtering and continuing.
Freezing a reconstituted solution is possible but costs you something: each freeze-thaw cycle concentrates solutes at the ice front and stresses the peptide. Where a stock must be kept beyond the working window, aliquot into single-use volumes before the first freeze so no aliquot is thawed twice.
Solubility problems and how to resolve them
Most sequences dissolve readily in bacteriostatic water. Hydrophobic sequences may not, and the correct response is not more agitation. Adding a small volume of dilute acetic acid lowers the pH and increases the net positive charge on basic residues, which pushes aggregates apart; the acidified stock is then brought to working volume with bacteriostatic water. Acidic peptides sometimes respond better to a dilute base instead.
A cake that appears to have vanished from the vial has usually not been lost. Lyophilised material at small masses forms a film on the glass that is easy to mistake for an empty vial; reconstituting and swirling recovers it. If a compound genuinely will not go into solution after acidification, contact the lab with the lot number before discarding it.
Compliance and intended use
Every compound supplied is for in-vitro laboratory research by qualified personnel. None are medicines, none carry a marketing authorisation, and none are intended or supplied for human or veterinary consumption. We do not provide dosing guidance, protocols for administration to living subjects, or clinical advice of any kind, and enquiries requesting them will be declined.