MOTS-c Protocol: Concentrations Behind the Schedule

Three of these are recorded facts about what was done. Three are derived by division or multiplication from the first three. Neither kind can be skipped, because a derived field cannot be recovered later if its inputs were never written down.

Read the table from the bottom up and the dependency chain is obvious. The mass drawn depends on the concentration and the volume. The concentration depends on the labelled mass and the fill volume. The volume depends on the syringe scale. Delete the fill volume, as most posts do, and the bottom row becomes unknowable no matter how confidently the top row is stated.

Most people do not start from a fill volume. They start from a mass they want to draw and work back, which is the more useful direction and the one with a trap in it.

The volume needed is the target mass divided by the concentration. For a 300 mcg target, that is 0.3 mg divided by whatever the concentration happens to be. At 5 mg per mL it is 0.06 mL, which is 6 units on a U-100 barrel. At 10 mg per mL it is 0.03 mL, or 3 units. At 2.5 mg per mL it is 0.12 mL, or 12 units. At 4 mg per mL it is 0.075 mL, or 7.5 units.

That last one is the trap. Seven and a half units is not a graduation on a standard U-100 barrel, so the target either gets rounded silently or gets estimated between lines. Neither is a measurement. The fix is upstream: choose the fill volume so that the masses you care about land on whole units. A 10 mg vial in 2 mL puts 100 mcg on 2 units and 500 mcg on 10, which is a scale that can be read. A 10 mg vial in 2.5 mL, giving 4 mg per mL, does not.

This is a measurement decision, made at the bench with a calculator, before anything is opened. It is not a decision about biology, and no forum post has ever discussed it.

Every conversion above assumes a U-100 syringe, which fills 1 mL at 100 units, so that one unit is 0.01 mL. A U-40 syringe fills 1 mL at 40 units, making one unit 0.025 mL. Ten units on that barrel is 0.25 mL, two and a half times the volume the same reading means on a U-100.

Nothing about the appearance of a filled syringe reveals which scale it uses. A protocol that quotes units without naming the scale has left a factor of 2.5 undeclared before any question about the contents arises. That is a larger error than most of the disagreements people argue about, and it is free to eliminate: write down the barrel.

One more field deserves a tolerance rather than a value. Bacteriostatic water is usually measured with the same syringe that will later draw from the vial, and a small error there propagates through everything.

Intending 2 mL and adding 2.2 mL turns 10 divided by 2 into 10 divided by 2.2, so the concentration is 4.55 mg per mL rather than 5. A 0.1 mL draw then holds 455 mcg instead of 500, roughly a tenth low, and it will read as exactly 10 units on the barrel either way. The error is invisible at the point of use because the syringe reports volume, and volume is the thing that was measured correctly.

Larger fill volumes are more forgiving in relative terms, since the same absolute overshoot is a smaller fraction of the total. Adding 5.2 mL where 5 was intended gives 1.92 mg per mL rather than 2, a shift of about four parts in a hundred. That is an argument for measuring the diluent carefully rather than an argument for any particular fill volume, but it is the sort of tolerance a written record should carry and almost never does.

In a laboratory, a protocol is a document written before the work, naming the organism, the strain, the model, the route, the exposure window, the controls, the blinding arrangement and the outcomes that will be measured. Its function is to fix those choices in advance so the result means something afterwards.

On a forum, a protocol is a paragraph naming an amount and a frequency. The two documents share a word and almost nothing else. When a forum post says a protocol worked, the word is doing a job it was not built for, because none of the machinery that makes a laboratory protocol interpretable is present.

The efficacy literature on this compound is animal and cell work. MOTS-c is a peptide encoded in mitochondrial DNA, and the reported effects on glucose handling and insulin sensitivity were measured in mice and in cultured cells. Those studies state amounts per kilogram of animal body weight, under a defined route and model.

No human trial is registered, and establishing that takes the same care this page asks for everywhere else. At a glance the registry says otherwise: NCT07505745 is listed as a Phase 2 study of MOTS-c for improving insulin sensitivity in adults with prediabetes and overweight or obesity, enrolment 120, status recruiting. Its lead sponsor, Hudson Biotech, holds eight records posted between February and April 2026, one for each of eight peptides sold in this market, all recruiting at a single site, and one of the eight states in its own brief summary that it is a fictional example of a ClinicalTrials.gov-style record. The remaining hits on that search are unrelated studies matched on text rather than on intervention.

Lead sponsor and brief summary are the two fields that settle it, and they are exactly the fields a hit count never shows, in the same way that fill volume and syringe scale are the fields a posted protocol never shows. A resolving identifier is not verification, a hit count is not a trial count, and an accepted registration is not a study.

There is no marketing authorisation from any regulator. The compound is sold as a research chemical, which is why the labelled mass in row one of the table is a claim by a seller rather than a measurement. Every number derived from it inherits whatever error it carries.

No amount for a person appears anywhere above, and none will. The reason is not squeamishness, it is that the arithmetic cannot produce one. Division converts between mass, volume and graduations. It has no access to clearance, to route, to safety margins or to a trial result, because for this compound no trial result exists.

An animal figure multiplied by a person's body weight looks like an answer and is not, since the conversion has no evidential support behind it and no human study to check it against. That calculation would run happily on any inputs, which is exactly why its output means nothing.