Cartalax

Cartalax is a synthetic tripeptide, Ala-Glu-Asp, from the Khavinson short-peptide bioregulator programme. The literature refers to it by the code AED, and occasionally as the T-31 peptide.

The sequence is claimed directly in the patent that covers it, RU2299741C1 and its international counterpart WO2007139433A1, as H-Ala-Glu-Asp-OH, and Khavinson's own review tables in Molecules in 2021 and in the International Journal of Molecular Sciences in 2022 list AED under this name. The tissue the programme associates it with is bone and cartilage; the patent's title is about metabolism in osseous and cartilage tissue.

One active transcription error is worth naming, because it is in a source most catalogues would trust. The NLM MeSH record for this substance carries an entry term reading H-Asp-Glu-Asp-OH, which is a different tripeptide, and that string has propagated into the synonym list of the PubChem record. The deposited structure, the patent claim and Khavinson's own tables all say Ala-Glu-Asp. Copying a synonym list wholesale from PubChem imports the error.

Both termini are free: an unmodified N-terminal amine and a free C-terminal carboxyl. The formula and mass are for that free acid, from PubChem CID 87815447 and stated independently in the patent. The isolated substance the patent describes is an acetate, and no primary source gives the acetate stoichiometry, so no salt-adjusted mass can be derived from the figure here.

No CAS number is printed. A number does circulate, but it appears only as a synonym deposited on PubChem by a chemical supplier, with no curated registry heading behind it, unlike the neighbouring peptide Pinealon whose number is carried by a curated environmental-chemistry database.

There is no tryptophan, tyrosine or phenylalanine, so there is no chromophore at 280 nm and the patent's own chromatography is run at 220 nm. There is no cysteine and no methionine. No receptor has been identified for this compound.

The published molecular work is expression and docking rather than binding. Ashapkin, Khavinson and colleagues, in Molecular Biology Reports in 2020, assayed IGF1, NFkB, TERT, TNKS2 and FOXO1 transcript levels in the human embryonic bone-marrow mesenchymal line FetMSC. Caputi and colleagues, in 2019, assayed GAP43 and Nestin by immunofluorescence and western blot in human periodontal ligament stem cells. Khavinson and colleagues, in Advances in Gerontology in 2014, modelled the peptide into the DNA minor groove, reporting its most favourable complexes with alternating adenine-thymine decamer duplexes.