Research Comparison
Epithalon vs SS-31
A side-by-side research comparison of Epithalon and SS-31 drawn from DRPSHP' peptide database records.
Epithalon
Epithalon, also written epitalon, has one of the shortest sequences in this catalogue: Ala-Glu-Asp-Gly, four residues. It was designed as a synthetic stand-in for epithalamin, an extract of bovine pineal tissue that a St Petersburg group had been studying as a regulator of ageing. That group, and collaborators connected to it, produced the large majority of the literature, covering human cells in culture, rodents, fruit flies and some human studies in Russian-language journals. The themes are telomere biology, pineal gland activity and lifespan. Two cautions apply: findings from independent laboratories are scarce, and the human work is thin and comes from the same source.
SS-31
SS-31, known clinically as elamipretide, is a four-residue peptide built to home in on mitochondria. Its sequence is D-Arg-Dmt-Lys-Phe-NH2, where Dmt stands for 2',6'-dimethyltyrosine. A D-amino acid at the front resists enzymatic breakdown, and at neutral pH the molecule has a net charge of +3. The SS label honours Szeto and Schiller, whose group derived a family of such peptides from opioid chemistry, although SS-31 itself is described as lacking opioid activity. Mechanistic work mostly uses isolated mitochondria, cell lines and rodent models of ischaemia. Human trials exist, particularly in inherited mitochondrial disease, but they are smaller and less uniform than the preclinical data.
Reading a comparison
A comparison places two records side by side; it does not merge them. Each description above is drawn from that compound's own record, and the two were not necessarily characterised by the same methods, at the same time, or to the same level of detail. Before comparing any attribute, it is worth establishing that both records describe the substance you think they describe — names are not identifiers, and two entries sharing a name can differ in salt form, stereochemistry or the convention used to state a mass. Where a figure carries no method beside it, the comparison is between two reported numbers rather than between two measurements.