Learn
What Is A Peptide?
Your cells pass messages to each other all day. Peptides are those messages. Everything else on this site follows from that one idea.
The whole idea, in four steps
- Amino acids are beads.
There are about twenty kinds. Your body uses them to build almost everything.
- String a few together and you have a peptide.
Two beads, ten beads, forty beads. Short chain, one message.
- String a lot together and you have a protein.
Same beads, same string. Length is the only line between the two words, and it is a fuzzy one.
- The order of the beads is the message.
Change one bead and it says something else. That is why there are so many peptides and why each one is studied separately.
The numbers
- Building blocks
- About 20 amino acids
- Typical peptide
- 2 to 50 beads long
- Typical protein
- Hundreds of beads
- Made by your body
- Thousands of different peptides
- A famous one
- Insulin — 51 amino acids
- On this site
- 13 compounds on file
So what is a peptide, exactly?
A peptide is
- A short chain of amino acids
- A message between cells
- Something your body already makes thousands of
- Defined by the order of its links
A peptide is not
- A vitamin or a mineral
- A steroid
- One single thing — the word covers thousands of molecules
- Approved for people just because your body makes one like it
Your body makes thousands of these. That is why researchers keep looking at them — and why a body making one naturally says nothing about whether a jar of it is safe.
Why anyone cares
If cells already run on these messages, then reading and writing the messages is a way in. That is the whole reason this field exists. It is not a claim that any particular message does anything for anyone.
Nothing on this page says any compound does anything for anyone. None of them
is approved for people to take. Talk to a doctor about your health.