Everything that happens after the courier leaves: which solvent belongs in which vial, the arithmetic that turns milligrams per vial into units on a syringe, a per-vial volume reference for the catalog, and how long the solution actually lasts once the cake is gone. Laboratory reference only — no administration guidance, no dosing.
A peptide does not arrive as a powder because powder is convenient. It arrives that way because water is the fastest route to hydrolysis, deamidation and aggregation, and freeze-drying removes it. Reconstitution is the deliberate, controlled reversal of that step — and the point at which a lot that cleared every release assay becomes your responsibility.
Freeze-drying removes water by sublimation under vacuum and leaves a porous solid: the lyophilized cake. A correct cake is uniform and white, occupies roughly the volume the solution did, and shows no collapse, no shrinkage away from the glass and no crystalline glitter. Its appearance is the first piece of quality information you get, and it is free.
The vial is sealed under partial vacuum at the end of the lyophilisation cycle. That negative pressure is why solvent is drawn in almost on its own when the needle enters, and why a vial that offers no resistance at all should be treated with suspicion — a seal that failed in transit means the cake has been exposed to atmospheric moisture.
The liquid you add does three jobs at once: it dissolves the cake, it fixes the concentration for the rest of the vial's life, and it either does or does not protect the contents from the microorganisms your needle introduces on every subsequent entry. Only one of those three is chemistry. The other two are bookkeeping and hygiene, and they are where most mistakes happen.
Four liquids come up in practice. Three of them are correct in specific circumstances and one of them is almost never what you want. The deciding question is not solubility — most of this catalog dissolves in plain water — but how many times the septum will be pierced, and whether a preservative would interfere with what you are measuring.
| Composition | Sterile WFI + 0.9% benzyl alcohol |
|---|---|
| Multi-use window | Up to 28 days after first puncture |
| Storage after opening | +4 °C |
| Use it when | The vial will be accessed more than once |
| Avoid it when | Benzyl alcohol would confound the assay |
| Catalog item | 20 mL vial, USD 14 |
| Composition | Water, preservative-free |
|---|---|
| Multi-use window | None — single session |
| Storage after opening | Discard the remainder |
| Use it when | Whole vial is consumed or aliquoted at once |
| Avoid it when | Repeated entry over days is planned |
| Typical role | Cell-culture and analytical work |
| Composition | Dilute acetic acid in sterile water |
|---|---|
| Purpose | Solubilising sequences that resist neutral pH |
| Typical case | IGF-1 LR3 |
| Method | Dissolve in acid first, dilute after |
| Preservative | None — treat as single-session |
| Caution | Not interchangeable with bac water |
| Composition | Sodium chloride 0.9% in water |
|---|---|
| Preservative | Usually none |
| Problem | Ionic strength can promote aggregation |
| Multi-use window | None in the plain formulation |
| Use it when | A protocol specifically calls for it |
| Otherwise | Prefer bacteriostatic water |
The practical rule is short. If you are going to open the vial once, preservative-free water is fine and arguably cleaner. If you are going to open it on Monday and again on Thursday, the benzyl alcohol in bacteriostatic water is doing work that nothing else in the workflow does. The one solvent question that is genuinely compound-specific is solubility at neutral pH, and in this catalog that affects exactly one entry — IGF-1 LR3. Everything else dissolves in water.
This is the part people get wrong, and it is the part that is genuinely trivial once written down. There are two equations and one unit conversion. Nothing on this page is more complicated than that.
| Concentration | C = m ÷ V |
|---|---|
| Volume to draw | V = m ÷ C |
| m | Mass printed on the vial (mg) |
| V | Solvent volume added (mL) |
| C | Resulting concentration (mg/mL) |
| Invariant | m never changes. Only C does. |
| 1 mL | 100 units |
|---|---|
| 1 unit | 0.01 mL = 10 µL |
| 10 units | 0.10 mL = 100 µL |
| 25 units | 0.25 mL |
| 50 units | 0.50 mL |
| Kit barrel | 0.5 mL = 50 units full scale |
The same three lines of arithmetic applied to a 5 mg vial, a 1 mg vial and a 10 mg vial. Note that the smallest vial produces the lowest concentration and therefore the most syringe units per milligram — small vials are easier to measure, not harder.
Five milligrams of lyophilized peptide dissolved in 2 mL of bacteriostatic water gives a 2.5 mg/mL solution, which is the most common working concentration in this catalog because it lands on a round 25 µg per syringe unit.
The full 0.5 mL barrel of the kit syringe holds 50 units of this solution, or 1.25 mg of peptide — one quarter of the vial.
One milligram in 1 mL gives 1 mg/mL and 10 µg per unit — the finest resolution available on a standard insulin syringe, which matters because this is the lowest-mass vial in the catalog.
This is the one entry in the catalog where the solvent is not bacteriostatic water by default: dissolve in 0.6% acetic acid first, then dilute if the protocol requires it.
Ten milligrams in 2 mL gives 5 mg/mL and 50 µg per unit. Doubling the mass at constant volume doubles the concentration and halves the number of units needed for the same quantity of peptide.
Acylated, albumin-binding peptides foam more readily than short unmodified sequences. Deliver the solvent slowly down the wall and give this one the full two minutes to stand.
Every catalog item that ships as a lyophilized cake, with the mass on the vial, the solvent this reference standardises on, a working volume chosen so the concentration lands on a round figure, and the mass carried by one unit of a U-100 syringe. The volume column is a convention, not a specification: any volume is chemically valid, and changing it changes only the concentration column.
| Compound | Category | Per vial | Solvent | Volume | Concentration | Per unit (10 µL) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| IGF-1 LR3 1 mg / vial | Growth & Anabolic | 1 mg | 0.6% AcOH | 1 mL | 1 mg/mL | 10 µg |
| CJC-1295 (No DAC) 5 mg / vial | Growth & Anabolic | 5 mg | BAC | 2 mL | 2.5 mg/mL | 25 µg |
| CJC-1295 (with DAC) 5 mg / vial | Growth & Anabolic | 5 mg | BAC | 2 mL | 2.5 mg/mL | 25 µg |
| CJC-1295 No DAC + Ipamorelin Blend 5 mg + 5 mg / vial | Growth & Anabolic | 10 mg | BAC | 2 mL | 5 mg/mL | 50 µg |
| Ipamorelin 5 mg / vial | Growth & Anabolic | 5 mg | BAC | 2 mL | 2.5 mg/mL | 25 µg |
| Tesamorelin 5 mg / vial | Growth & Anabolic | 5 mg | BAC | 2 mL | 2.5 mg/mL | 25 µg |
| MOTS-c 10 mg / vial | Growth & Anabolic | 10 mg | BAC | 2 mL | 5 mg/mL | 50 µg |
| BPC-157 5 mg / vial | Healing & Recovery | 5 mg | BAC | 2 mL | 2.5 mg/mL | 25 µg |
| TB-500 (Thymosin β-4 Fragment) 5 mg / vial | Healing & Recovery | 5 mg | BAC | 2 mL | 2.5 mg/mL | 25 µg |
| BPC-157 + TB-500 Blend 5 mg + 5 mg / vial | Healing & Recovery | 10 mg | BAC | 2 mL | 5 mg/mL | 50 µg |
| GHK-Cu (Copper Peptide) 50 mg 50 mg / vial | Healing & Recovery | 50 mg | BAC | 5 mL | 10 mg/mL | 100 µg |
| GHK-Cu (Copper Peptide) 100 mg 100 mg / vial | Healing & Recovery | 100 mg | BAC | 10 mL | 10 mg/mL | 100 µg |
| 3-GLP (Retatrutide) 10 mg / vial | Metabolic & Weight | 10 mg | BAC | 2 mL | 5 mg/mL | 50 µg |
| AOD-9604 5 mg / vial | Metabolic & Weight | 5 mg | BAC | 2 mL | 2.5 mg/mL | 25 µg |
| Melanotan II (MT-2) 10 mg / vial | Skin & Cosmetic | 10 mg | BAC | 2 mL | 5 mg/mL | 50 µg |
| Melanotan I (MT-1, Afamelanotide) 10 mg / vial | Skin & Cosmetic | 10 mg | BAC | 2 mL | 5 mg/mL | 50 µg |
| GLOW 70 mg Blend 70 mg total (50 + 10 + 10) | Skin & Cosmetic | 70 mg | BAC | 5 mL | 14 mg/mL | 140 µg |
| KLOW 80 mg Blend 80 mg total (50 + 10 + 10 + 10) | Skin & Cosmetic | 80 mg | BAC | 5 mL | 16 mg/mL | 160 µg |
| SNAP-8 10 mg / vial | Skin & Cosmetic | 10 mg | BAC | 2 mL | 5 mg/mL | 50 µg |
| Selank 5 mg / vial | Cognitive & Sleep | 5 mg | BAC | 2 mL | 2.5 mg/mL | 25 µg |
| Semax 5 mg / vial | Cognitive & Sleep | 5 mg | BAC | 2 mL | 2.5 mg/mL | 25 µg |
| DSIP (Delta Sleep-Inducing Peptide) 5 mg / vial | Cognitive & Sleep | 5 mg | BAC | 2 mL | 2.5 mg/mL | 25 µg |
| PT-141 (Bremelanotide) 10 mg / vial | Sexual & Hormonal | 10 mg | BAC | 2 mL | 5 mg/mL | 50 µg |
| HCG (Human Chorionic Gonadotropin) 5 000 IU / vial | Sexual & Hormonal | 5 000 IU | BAC | 5 mL | 1 000 IU/mL | 10 IU |
| Teriparatide (PTH 1-34) 10 mg / vial | Sexual & Hormonal | 10 mg | BAC | 2 mL | 5 mg/mL | 50 µg |
| NAD+ (Nicotinamide Adenine Dinucleotide) 500 mg / vial | Support & Solvents | 500 mg | BAC | 10 mL | 50 mg/mL | 500 µg |
| L-Glutathione (Reduced) 1 500 mg / vial | Support & Solvents | 1 500 mg | WFI | 10 mL | 150 mg/mL | 1.5 mg |
BAC = bacteriostatic water · WFI = sterile water for injection, preservative-free · 0.6% AcOH = dilute acetic acid. The concentration and per-unit columns are computed from the two preceding columns at page render, so they cannot drift out of step with the catalog. The remaining 7 items in the 34-compound catalog do not appear here because they need no solvent: three ship as capsules or bulk powder, two are supplied pre-dissolved as 30 mL topical solutions, and two are the support items used to perform the reconstitution itself.
The order matters more than the speed. Steps two and three are the ones habitually skipped, and they are the two that determine whether the rest of the vial is trustworthy a week later.
Take the peptide vial and the solvent out of refrigeration and leave them on the bench for ten to fifteen minutes. Cold solvent wets a lyophilized cake more slowly, and a cold vial pulled straight into a warm room condenses moisture on the glass exactly where you are about to work.
Divide the mass printed on the vial by the volume you intend to add. Write the result on the label before anything is opened. A concentration reconstructed from memory three days later is a guess, and a guess in this position propagates into every measurement that follows.
Wipe the rubber septum of the peptide vial and of the solvent vial with a fresh 70% isopropyl alcohol pad, one pad per septum, and let each air-dry for roughly thirty seconds. Alcohol kills by evaporating; a septum that is still wet has not finished being disinfected, and the residue rides the needle inward.
With a sterile single-use syringe, draw the solvent volume you calculated in step two. Read the graduation at eye level against the leading edge of the plunger seal, not the top of the flange, and clear air bubbles before withdrawing from the solvent vial.
Enter the peptide septum at a shallow angle and let the stream run down the inside of the glass. Do not aim it at the cake. The residual vacuum will pull the liquid in faster than you intend, so resist the plunger rather than pushing it — a jet directly into the cake is the most common cause of foaming.
Withdraw the needle, drop the syringe straight into a sharps container, and let the vial stand upright for one to two minutes. Then roll or swirl it gently between the fingers until the solution is uniform. Shaking whips air into the liquid and shears longer sequences at the air-liquid interface.
Hold the vial against white, then against black. White reveals particulates and fibres; black reveals haze and turbidity. A correctly reconstituted solution is optically clear against both. If it is not, stop here — the vial has told you something that no further handling will fix.
Write the concentration and the reconstitution date directly on the vial. Store it upright at +4 °C away from light. If it will not be consumed inside the stability window below, split it into single-use aliquots now, while the solution is still fresh and the vial has been entered exactly once.
Every assay in the release workflow — HPLC purity, mass-spectrometric identity, endotoxin burden — describes the contents of a sealed vial. None of them survives contact with a used needle. The point of sterile technique is not ritual; it is that the analytical work already paid for stops being meaningful the moment the barrier is breached carelessly.
A 70% isopropyl pad is a single-use item. Wiping two septa with the same pad transfers whatever was on the first to the second. Wipe once, in one direction, and discard. The IGF1 Shop injection kit ships 100 individually wrapped pads against 50 syringes precisely because the correct ratio is two pads per session.
A needle that has been through a septum once is no longer sterile, and it is also blunter — coring pushes fragments of rubber into the vial. The kit syringes are 29-gauge with permanently attached needles, single-use and EO-sterilised. There is no procedure in which reusing one is the right call.
Used syringes belong in a rigid, puncture-resistant container, disposed of according to local rules for medical sharps. This is the one step in the protocol that protects somebody other than you, and it is not supplied in any kit — you have to have arranged it before you start.
Most reconstitution problems announce themselves visually within two minutes. The table below maps what you can see to the most probable cause and to whether the material is still usable. When a row says stop, it means stop: no amount of warming, swirling or waiting recovers an aggregated peptide.
These are not preferences. Each one either destroys the material or destroys your ability to say what is in it, and neither is recoverable by careful handling afterwards.
Mechanical agitation denatures peptides at the air-liquid interface and produces aggregates that will not redissolve. The damage is invisible until it is haze, and by then the sequence has already been altered. Swirl, stand, wait — the cake dissolves on its own timescale.
Freezing itself is well tolerated. The cycle is not: each thaw concentrates solutes at the receding ice boundary and subjects the peptide to a local environment nothing like the bulk solution. Aliquot before freezing, thaw once, and discard what is left over.
One pass through a septum ends the sterility of the needle and blunts it enough to core the rubber. A vial re-entered with a used needle carries an unknown microbial and particulate load, which makes every analytical figure on its Certificate of Analysis inapplicable to what is now inside.
A refrigerated vial with no concentration and no date written on it is unusable material, whatever is dissolved in it. There is no way to reconstruct either number from the vial itself, and estimating them turns a measured experiment into an anecdote.
Most of the catalog behaves identically: bacteriostatic water, gentle swirl, clear solution. Six cases do not, and five of the six are predictable from the chemistry printed on the product page.
An 83-residue analogue is a different solubility problem from a five-residue peptide. IGF-1 LR3 dissolves reluctantly at neutral pH; 0.6% acetic acid is the conventional first solvent, with dilution afterwards if the protocol calls for it. Forcing it into plain water with agitation is the fastest way to aggregate it.
The copper(II) chelate absorbs in the red, so a correctly reconstituted GHK-Cu solution is deep blue. This is the single case in the catalog where colour is not a warning sign. The 50 mg and 100 mg vials are the same compound at different fill masses, and both take the same 10 mg/mL working concentration.
Four catalog entries are blends freeze-dried together in one vial. One volume of solvent reconstitutes every component simultaneously, and the concentration column in the table above refers to the combined mass. The individual component masses are printed on the product page for each blend.
NAD+ at 500 mg and L-glutathione at 1 500 mg per vial carry far more solid than any peptide in the catalog. Both take 10 mL so the solution stays well clear of saturation, and glutathione oxidises on contact with air — reconstitute it immediately before use rather than storing the solution.
A glycoprotein hormone is standardised by biological activity, not by mass, so the vial reads 5 000 IU rather than a number of milligrams. The arithmetic is unchanged — 5 000 IU in 5 mL is 1 000 IU/mL — but every figure downstream carries IU as its unit, and mixing the two conventions in one notebook is a common and expensive error.
The two 30 mL topical compounds in the catalog are supplied pre-dissolved in an ethanol and propylene glycol vehicle at a stated concentration. They need no reconstitution and must not be diluted with water, which would drop the solute out of the vehicle. They are absent from the volume table for that reason.
A reconstituted peptide is a decaying asset, and the rate depends on three things you control: temperature, the presence of a preservative, and how many times the vial is opened. The windows below are the ones IGF1 Shop publishes on its quality documentation.
Ambient temperature is a working condition for the ten minutes the vial is on the bench, not a place to leave a solution overnight.
Lower end of the published 14–28 day range. Preservative-free solvent gives no protection against what the needle brings in.
The upper end of the published window, and the reason bacteriostatic water is the default solvent for any multi-session vial.
The long-term option, and the only one that survives past the refrigerated window. −80 °C where available; never refreeze a thawed aliquot.
| Ambient, dark | Several weeks |
|---|---|
| +4 °C | 12 months |
| −20 °C | 24 months |
| Shipping form | Ambient, insulated mailer |
| Light | Keep in the carton |
| Printed on | Per-lot Certificate of Analysis |
| Bacteriostatic water, +4 °C | Up to 28 days |
|---|---|
| Preservative-free, +4 °C | Shorter — 14 days upper bound |
| Frozen aliquots | −20 °C or −80 °C |
| Freeze-thaw cycles | 1 |
| Orientation | Upright, away from light |
| Label must carry | Concentration + date |
The storage profile for the specific lot you received is printed on its Certificate of Analysis, alongside the batch number, the release date and the three release assays. Where the COA and a general reference disagree, the COA wins: it describes your vial, this page describes the class. The reasoning behind the ambient-temperature shipping decision is set out in the shipping policy.
Three independent assays stand behind every released lot, and all three describe the contents of a sealed vial at the moment of release. Understanding what each one can and cannot predict about what you see on the bench is the difference between reading a COA and quoting one.
Reverse-phase HPLC at 220 nm against a reference standard reports area-percent purity, with a release floor of 99.0%. It says how much of the solid is the intended sequence. It says nothing about how that solid will behave in your chosen solvent — a 99.6% lot and a 99.1% lot dissolve identically. See the HPLC method for the full parameter set.
ESI-MS confirms molecular weight to within ±1 Da of theoretical, catching truncations and oxidation that co-elute invisibly under an HPLC peak. It is an identity check, not a handling prediction. The method is documented on the mass spectrometry page.
The kinetic chromogenic LAL assay caps released lots below 0.5 EU/mg. That figure describes a sealed vial. Endotoxin introduced afterwards — by a re-used needle, a wet septum, a non-sterile solvent — is invisible, cumulative and entirely yours. The assay is explained on the endotoxin testing page.
All three assays are run by a contract laboratory that is structurally independent of the synthesis facility and accredited under ISO/IEC 17025:2017. The end-to-end release sequence is described on the quality workflow page, and the terminology used throughout — lyophilisation, lyophilized cake, bacteriostatic water, endotoxin unit — is defined in the glossary.
Five items. Two of them come from the catalog, two are consumables you should already have, and one is a decision rather than an object.
| The compound | Sealed lyophilized vial |
|---|---|
| Certificate of Analysis | Per lot, in the shipment |
| Bacteriostatic water | 20 mL vial, ordered separately |
| Injection kit | 50 syringes + 100 pads |
| Syringe format | U-100, 0.5 mL, 29G, single-use |
| Pads | 70% isopropyl, individually wrapped |
| Sharps container | Rigid, puncture-resistant |
|---|---|
| Refrigerator | +4 °C, stable |
| Freezer | −20 °C for aliquots |
| Label and marker | Solvent-resistant ink |
| The concentration decision | Made before opening |
| Legal compliance | Your jurisdiction, your responsibility |
Both catalog items sit in the Support & Solvents category: bacteriostatic water at USD 14 for a 20 mL vial, and the injection kit at USD 25 for 50 sterile U-100 syringes and 100 alcohol prep pads. One 20 mL vial of solvent reconstitutes ten 2 mL vials, so the ratio that usually makes sense is one solvent vial per handful of compounds.
Scope of this page. This is a laboratory handling reference: solvent selection, concentration arithmetic, sterile technique and storage. It contains no dosing guidance and no administration protocol, and it is not one. IGF1 Shop supplies research-grade compounds for in-vitro laboratory work only, not for human or veterinary use; several catalog compounds are investigational drugs that are not approved for human use outside trial protocols. Legality of import, possession and use varies by jurisdiction and is the buyer's responsibility — the full terms are set out in the research disclaimer and the terms of use.
Still unresolved? Verified orders can reach customer support with the lot number from the vial cap. For a broader comparison of what is in the catalog and why, see the 2026 buyer's guide.
