Explainer
What a DSS colitis mouse is actually a model of
Dextran sulfate sodium damages the epithelial barrier chemically, on a schedule the experimenter sets. That is useful, and it is not inflammatory bowel disease.
Archive
Dispatches
Reporting and criticism on the preclinical peptide literature: how the studies were built, who built them, and what the results can carry.
Vol. 6 · Updated monthly
The lead · Methods
One lab, many tendons: the replication problem under the BPC-157 literature
Most of what is published about this pentadecapeptide in rat tendon and ligament models traces back to a small number of connected groups. That is not evidence of misconduct. It is a structural fact about the literature, and it changes how much any single reported effect is worth.
Back catalogue
Everything else we have published
Column
Sample Size: what n equals eight buys you, and what it does not
Eight animals per arm is the modal group size in this literature. Here is the range of true effects such a study can miss entirely, drawn without a single assumption you have to take on faith.
Evidence Review
Copper peptides and the distance between a fibroblast dish and skin
GHK-Cu does measurable things to cultured human dermal fibroblasts. Cultured fibroblasts are not dermis, and the rodent work that bridges the two is thinner than the citation count suggests.
History
How one unreplicated 2003 paper became a settled fact
A citation trail is a physical object. Follow one far enough and you often find that the tenth source is quoting the ninth, and that the first never said it.
Evidence Review
Host-defense peptides and the antibiotic resistance conversation
LL-37 kills bacteria in a dish at concentrations that mean very little in a mouse, and the mouse infection models that follow are harder to interpret than the press releases allow.
Evidence Review
Mitochondrial-derived peptides: a young field, assessed honestly
MOTS-c and humanin are barely two decades old as named entities. The mouse work is interesting and the human evidence is close to absent, and both of those things are worth saying in the same sentence.
Evidence Review
What the murine infarct models measured when they measured thymosin beta-4
Ejection fraction, scar area and vessel density are three different questions. Papers in this corner of the literature often answer whichever one moved.
Methods
Why we do not publish dosing, and what we publish instead
The single most requested thing from this publication is the one thing it will never carry. The reason is editorial before it is legal.
Every dispatch is a summary or criticism of published animal-model research. No dosing, sourcing or human-use guidance appears in any of them.
By email
New dispatches, roughly twice a month
One piece of reporting or criticism, plus a note on anything in the Library that changed since the last issue.