What Is Selank? A Plain-English Guide
Selank explained simply: a seven-bead peptide built on a fragment of an antibody, which is not where you would expect a brain research compound to start.
Selank usually gets introduced as a companion to Semax. The two do share an origin and a design trick.
They do not share a parent molecule. And Selank's parent is the more surprising of the two.
Selank comes as a freeze-dried powder, for lab research only.
What the molecule is
Selank is a lab-made seven-bead peptide, built on tuftsin.
Tuftsin is the unexpected part. It is not a brain peptide at all. It is a four-bead piece cut from an antibody, and its published role is in immune signalling, particularly how scavenging cells behave. It is named after Tufts University, where it was described.
Selank bolts a Pro-Gly-Pro tail onto that four-bead piece, making seven beads in total.
- Molecular weight: 751.88 g/mol
- CAS number: 129954-34-3
- Comes as a freeze-dried powder, in a 10mg vial
- Store it at minus 20 degrees Celsius, away from light
The Pro-Gly-Pro habit
The tail is the same one bolted onto Semax, and for the same reason.
Short peptides get chewed up fast. Proline's side branch loops back and joins the backbone, making a ring that stiffens the chain there. A stiff bit of chain is a poor target for the enzymes doing the chewing. So the cap slows the damage a lot, compared with the bare parent.
It is worth being exact about what that shared feature does and does not mean.
Semax and Selank carry the same cap because they came out of the same research programme, which applied one solution to two different starting molecules.
The cap is a delivery habit. It is not a mechanism. It does not make the two compounds related in what they do.
Their parents make that plain. A pituitary hormone fragment in one case, an antibody fragment in the other.
What researchers have looked at
Published studies in dishes and in animals cover three areas.
GABA signalling
The most reported area. Published work reports measurements to do with GABA signalling, and with the genes tied to that system. Tests usually measure gene or protein levels, or how the molecule binds in tissue preparations.
Broad gene activity
A body of work looks at wider changes in gene activity in animal brain tissue after exposure. These are broad surveys rather than single-target measurements.
Immune signalling
Following from the tuftsin parent. Published work reports measurements here. This body is smaller, and it is one of the more interesting threads, because it is where the parent molecule's known role actually sits.
Reading the research
Three cautions.
Tuftsin and Selank are different molecules. There is a substantial body of work on tuftsin itself, mostly in immunology. It is not work on Selank, and the added tail is not a trivial change.
Much of the original work is in Russian. Like Semax, Selank was developed and studied largely inside the Russian research system. A lot of it sits outside English-language indexes, and English summaries vary a great deal in how faithful they are.
Rodent behaviour is rodent behaviour. A large share of the published work is behavioural study in rodents. Second-hand sources restate those findings in language the original papers never used. That happens more with brain-adjacent compounds than anywhere else in our range.
Handling and paperwork
A 10mg vial of freeze-dried powder. Keep it at minus 20 degrees Celsius, out of the light.
What it dissolves in is on the product page. Those figures differ from Semax's, despite the two being much the same size.
Batch analysis is published. Each report confirms identity by weighing the molecule against the expected 751.88 g/mol, and reports purity by chromatography.
At seven beads there are few steps where something can go wrong. So its impurities are simpler than a long chain's, as our guide to reading a chromatogram covers.
Selank sits in our CNS research peptides group with Semax and DSIP. It also comes with Semax as a bundle of two separate freeze-dried vials.
Everything we sell is for lab research only. It is not a medicine, and it is not for people or animals to take.
