Buy MOTS-c Peptide: 16 Amino Acids in a 10 mg Vial

MOTS-c is a mitochondrial-derived peptide, encoded within the mitochondrial 12S ribosomal RNA region rather than in nuclear DNA. Its sequence is MRWQEMGYIFYPRKLR: 16 residues, average mass roughly 2,175 daltons. Lee and colleagues characterised it in Cell Metabolism in 2015 as a regulator of metabolic homeostasis acting through AMPK, in cell culture and in mice.

Put that mass next to the vial mass and the scale becomes concrete. 10 mg divided by 2,175 g/mol is about 4.6 micromoles of peptide. It is a small quantity of solid, typically a thin white cake or a film at the bottom of the vial, and it can be easy to mistake for an empty vial on first inspection. Some of it can also sit on the stopper rather than the base after transit.

Compare that with an incretin analogue at 39 residues carrying a lipid side chain, and the price difference across the two categories starts to look like chemistry rather than marketing. Short peptides are cheaper to make.

A research vial label is a supply document, not a patient-facing one. It should carry the compound name, the batch or lot number, the mass in the vial, the supplier, and a research-use-only statement.

What it will not carry is just as informative:

• No concentration. The powder has a mass and no volume, so there is no mg/mL until you add water. That number is your decision, not the supplier's.
• No directions. There is no approved indication, therefore nothing to instruct.
• No beyond-use date on a solution. The vial has an expiry for the dry powder; the clock on a reconstituted solution starts when you start it.
• No national drug code. There is no authorisation for one to be issued against.

Treat any of those appearing on a MOTS-c label as a warning rather than a reassurance. A research supplier printing dose instructions is either confused about what it is selling or deliberately selling it as something it is not, and either way the batch documentation behind it deserves harder scrutiny.

The batch number is the one field that does work for you. Ascension publishes two third-party assays per batch, from Kovera Labs (batch #24-05260628) and MZ Biolabs (batch #24-01260229). Certificates are only meaningful when the batch on the paper matches the batch on the glass, so read both before the vial goes anywhere near water.

Because the label stops at a mass, the first bench task is converting 10 mg into something measurable. 10 mg is 10,000 mcg. The diluent volume decides everything after that.

A U-100 barrel is graduated so that 100 units is 1 mL, which is why the unit count is simply the volume in millilitres multiplied by 100. At the common 2 mL fill the whole vial is 200 units, and each unit holds 50 mcg of a compound that cost $0.1875 to put there.

Two habits keep this honest. Write the fill volume on the vial before the water goes in, because a reconstituted vial with no volume written on it is an unknown concentration a week later. And run the numbers before you open anything: our syringe measurement guide covers the unit conversion and the calculator handles arbitrary volumes.

The honest answer for a UK buyer is that there is no domestic supply chain to find, only an import to arrange and a risk to accept.

MOTS-c holds no marketing authorisation from the MHRA and none from the EMA. It is not a licensed medicine, so no UK pharmacy can dispense it, no prescriber can write for it, and no NHS or private route exists to obtain it as a treatment. What does exist is trade in laboratory research material, which is a different legal category with different obligations attached to it.

Most sites advertising UK stock are reshippers. The pattern is recognisable: a .co.uk domain, prices in pounds, and a dispatch address that turns out to be a forwarding step on top of the same US or Asian supply the site is nominally saving you from. You pay the import cost either way, either directly or inside their margin, and you usually lose the batch trail in the process because the certificate belongs to whoever made the material rather than to whoever re-boxed it.

Import and customs treatment is a matter for HMRC and Border Force, and the risk of a parcel being held, charged or refused sits with the buyer. This page describes how the market works. It is not legal advice, and nothing here is a route around a control.

The border does not change the chemistry, only the denominator's price. Import VAT in the UK is 20%, and couriers add a handling or clearance charge for collecting it.

The handling figure is illustrative rather than quoted, because carriers set their own and publish them separately. Use whatever your carrier actually charges. The structural point survives any figure you substitute: it is a flat charge, so it divides by mass. On one 10 mg vial a $12.00 fee is $1.20 per milligram. On a five-vial order it would be $0.24 per milligram, which is why import charges punish small orders hardest.

There is also a threshold effect. Consignments valued under 135 pounds are generally handled with VAT charged at the point of sale, while higher-value consignments are cleared at the border with the charges raised there. A single $37.50 vial and a five-vial order can therefore be treated differently, and the second one attracts the clearance step.

Set against that, a US buyer pays $3.75 per milligram and stops. Our domestic supply page works through what that difference is worth, and our retatrutide UK page runs the same arithmetic on a larger vial for comparison.

Whatever the shipping route, the same short list decides whether the material is worth having.

• A batch-specific certificate. Not a sample certificate, not a generic PDF. The batch printed on it has to match the batch on your vial.
• A named testing laboratory. An anonymous chromatogram proves nothing. Two independent assays on the same batch are better than one.
• Both identity and purity. Mass spectrometry confirms the molecule is what it claims, and the measured mass for MOTS-c should sit close to 2,175 daltons. HPLC reports how much of the sample is that molecule.
• A dry, sealed vial. Lyophilised powder, an intact stopper, an unbroken crimp. Pre-mixed solutions are a red flag: they remove your control over concentration and they start a stability clock you did not choose.
• No human-use claims. A supplier making them is either uninformed about its own regulatory position or willing to misdescribe a product, and neither is a good foundation for trusting a milligram figure.

Our supplier checklist scores a vendor against these in more detail, and the sibling source ranking applies them with a stated methodology.

Lyophilised peptide is reasonably robust in transit, which is why it ships as a dry powder rather than as a solution. Robust is not the same as indifferent, and the vial should not sit on a doormat in July.

Handle it as our peptide storage guide describes for lyophilised material generally: keep the sealed vial cold and dark, bring it to room temperature before adding diluent so condensation does not form in the vial, and add the water down the wall of the glass rather than directly onto the cake. Do not shake it. Swirl until it clears.

Once reconstituted, the material is a solution with a shelf life rather than a powder with an expiry date. Our storage guide puts mitochondrial peptides at 14 to 21 days refrigerated at 2 to 8 degrees Celsius, shorter than the 28 days commonly quoted for acylated incretins, and flags repeated freeze-thaw as the specific sensitivity for this class. Write the reconstitution date on the vial alongside the volume. Both figures are handling conventions rather than batch-specific stability data, and no supplier certificate will give you the latter.

If you want the general background on peptide chemistry and handling before any of this, our beginners guide starts further back, and the MOTS-c reference page holds the reconstitution figures in one place.