LOL
@Spaceman Spiff the "King of Testing for harm reduction" doesn't know what dimer is, what it does, what it's an indicator of.
@MuscularMD
Dimer ("and related proteins") started being tested by UGL users because it's a proxy for manufacturing quality,
Dimer in the simplest terms are 2 peptide molecules attached to each other. HGH dimer is biologically active, but to a lesser degree than monomer.
If you don't know, the heart of chromatography, the first stage of the testing method used, is the separation of different size molecules in a column with pores of varying size. That's how dimer is separated from monomer,
The same separation by size technique used for testing is used for purification after the relatively sloppy process of making peptides.
So when you see 0% Dimer, you know the UGL lab at least performed that chromatographic purification process, which wasn't always the case. Once it started being tested for of course, the UGL labs began competing on that metric and no or low dimer has been common ever since.
It's a little more complicated than that though, as you can see from some ignorant folks pointing to pharma and claiming it's inferior because of its dimer content,
As if Pfizer or Merck aren't capable of producing something as high quality as a Chinese tech at a bench using cheap equipment in a dirty basement lab. I can assure you you'll never find an unsterile vial of Serostim, unlike UGL peptides.
Dimer can form from the addition of certain excipients that are added to ensure stability over the expected shelf life of the vial, and considered a worthwhile tradeoff to prevent the development of large aggregates, which present a risk to safety and waste far more active ingredient than a little Dimer,
So in typical Chinese fashion, you get a vial of UGL rHGH with 0% Dimer, right after reconstitution, which looks great, but compared the "inferior" pharma product 5,10,15 days after reconstitution the pharma product will prove more stable with less aggregate formation.
The other confounding factor is that we have no way of testing for insoluble aggregates, the kind degraded rHGH mostly results in, at least not directly.
First, any aggregates (and other contaminants) larger than .22um are filtered out before analysis, as part of the sample preparation, and secondly, even the small insoluble aggregates that pass the filter get clogged in the chromatography column, so aren't detected. For reference, .22um is about 600 times smaller than the smallest visible particle, so that leaves a lot of potential contaminants excluded from analysis,
That's why researchers, pharma, and the FDA use multiple methods of testing to get a complete picture of "purity".
This means we're only able to measure a small fraction of the impurities in rHGH with the testing we have available.
The testing has value, but it's limited, and perhaps the most important things to keep in mind are
1) If you're not filtering, you're not injecting something with the same 98% purity you see in the test, which is a post filtration measurement. Many people conflate "purity" with "safe snd clean". That's not what it means in this context.
2) The tests tell you nothing about stability, which determines how much aggregation formation there will be post reconstitution, particularly over a longer period like the 18 days you'll be using a vial,
