Written By: Neat Digital, Research Content Writer
Reviewed By: Natalie Kunsman, M.D., Board-Certified Physician
Last Reviewed: October 23, 2026
Store 5-Amino-1MQ as a dry solid at -20°C, sealed, desiccated and dark, and let the retest date on your lot certificate set the clock. The -20°C figure matches a published reference-grade specification for the iodide salt. The longer answer matters more, because almost every 5-Amino-1MQ storage page online was written as if this were a peptide. It isn’t one. It’s a small quaternary quinolinium salt, and the failure modes those pages warn about, ice crystal shearing and protein unfolding, can’t happen to a molecule with no protein structure to unfold. Three things can go wrong: the solid picks up water, the counterion oxidizes under light, and solutions grow bacteria.
What Is 5-Amino-1MQ, and Why Does That Answer Change Its Storage?
5-Amino-1MQ is 5-amino-1-methylquinolinium, a synthetic small-molecule inhibitor of nicotinamide N-methyltransferase. PubChem lists the cation as C10H11N2+ under CID 950107. It’s supplied most often as the iodide salt, CAS 42464-96-0, a powder sold at reference grade with a -20°C storage specification and 98 percent minimum purity by HPLC.
That classification isn’t pedantry. It changes which risks are real.
Peptides degrade through hydrolysis of amide bonds, oxidation of specific residues, aggregation and loss of folded structure. A quinolinium salt has none of that architecture. Research groups characterizing this chemical, starting with the 2017 structure-activity work by Neelakantan and colleagues in the Journal of Medicinal Chemistry, describe a permanently charged aromatic cation selected for membrane permeability. There’s no tertiary structure to lose.
So when a storage page tells you a single freeze-thaw cycle costs 15 to 20 percent potency because of ice crystal damage, it’s describing a mechanism that applies to proteins. Not to this material. The same page will also tell you to discard discolored powder, which brings us to the second problem.
How Should 5-Amino-1MQ Powder Be Stored?
Keep the dry solid at -20°C in its original sealed container, inside a secondary container with desiccant, away from light. A reference-grade specification for the iodide salt lists -20°C, and supplier listings classify the solid as combustible, which also rules out storing it next to oxidizers or ignition sources.
A few handling points matter more than the temperature number.
Let a sealed container equilibrate to room temperature before you open it. Cold glass pulls condensation out of room air, and water is the main enemy of a hygroscopic salt. Opening a container straight from the freezer undoes the desiccation you paid for.
Use a manual-defrost freezer if you have the choice. Auto-defrost units cycle warm on purpose, several times a day, and each cycle moves moisture around inside the compartment.
Weigh what you need and close the container. Minutes of open-air exposure in a humid room do more measurable harm than a brief temperature excursion. Keep the desiccant fresh, too, because silica gel that has already saturated is a packet taking up space.
This is the same logic behind keeping racetam powders dry, and the same reason we flag what repeated temperature cycling does to a stored solid.
Does the Salt Form Change Storage Requirements?
Yes, and this is the single biggest omission in the published guidance. The counterion determines how much water the solid pulls from the air and how it behaves under light.
A reference-grade listing for the iodide salt gives a molecular weight of 286.11 and an appearance specification of faint red to dark brown. Iodide salts oxidize toward free iodine, which is colored. That’s why one public certificate for this material specifies white to off-white crystalline powder while another specifies orange powder. Both can be in specification. They’re different salt forms, or different degrees of a color change the reference material already tolerates.
Two consequences follow.
First, color alone tells you almost nothing here. The accepted range on the reference material spans faint red to dark brown. Any page telling you to bin discolored 5-Amino-1MQ is applying a rule borrowed from white-powder chemistry. We take the same position on reading a change in powder appearance: appearance is a prompt to check the paperwork, not a verdict.
Second, your mass math depends on the salt. The iodide salt is listed at 286.11, and the cation alone works out to 159.21. Divide one by the other and you get 1.80, while one supplier’s product note gives 1.89 mg of iodide salt as 1 mg equivalent. Run the conversion yourself from the salt named on your own certificate rather than copying a ratio off a blog. We make the same argument about why molecular weight matters for solution work.
Yes, and this is the single biggest omission in the published guidance. The counterion determines how much water the solid pulls from the air and how it behaves under light.
A reference-grade listing for the iodide salt gives a molecular weight of 286.11 and an appearance specification of faint red to dark brown. Iodide salts oxidize toward free iodine, which is colored. That’s why one public certificate for this material specifies white to off-white crystalline powder while another specifies orange powder. Both can be in specification. They’re different salt forms, or different degrees of a color change the reference material already tolerates.
Two consequences follow.
First, color alone tells you almost nothing here. The accepted range on the reference material spans faint red to dark brown. Any page telling you to bin discolored 5-Amino-1MQ is applying a rule borrowed from white-powder chemistry. We take the same position on reading a change in powder appearance: appearance is a prompt to check the paperwork, not a verdict.
Second, your mass math depends on the salt. The iodide salt is listed at 286.11, and the cation alone works out to 159.21. Divide one by the other and you get 1.80, while one supplier’s product note gives 1.89 mg of iodide salt as 1 mg equivalent. Run the conversion yourself from the salt named on your own certificate rather than copying a ratio off a blog. We make the same argument about why molecular weight matters for solution work.
Which Storage Conditions Are Actually Sourced
Only 2 of the conditions below trace to a published source. The rest are standard laboratory handling, and we’d rather say so than dress practice up as data.
Sourced. The dry solid goes to -20°C, sealed, desiccated and dark. That temperature comes from a reference-grade specification for the iodide salt, and supplier listings also classify the solid as combustible, which rules out storage near oxidizers or heat sources. The second sourced item is the end of the stated period: when you reach the retest date, the answer is to re-analyze rather than discard, which follows the FDA stability guidance covered in the next section.
Practice, not published data. Return the container to -20°C between uses and equilibrate it sealed before opening, because condensation and water uptake are the realistic failure mode for a hygroscopic salt. Hold stock solutions in DMSO as single-use aliquots, frozen and dark, to keep the freeze-thaw count down and limit how much water the solvent pulls in. Keep aqueous working solutions at 2°C to 8°C and prepare them fresh, which addresses microbial growth rather than chemical decay.
Notice what that list doesn’t contain. No percentage of potency lost per week, per day, or per freeze-thaw cycle. Those figures circulate widely for this chemical, and none of them traces to a published measurement on 5-Amino-1MQ.
Your 2026 Certificate Sets the Retest Date, Not a Blog Post
The number that governs your material is on your certificate of analysis, and it’s a retest date rather than an expiry. The FDA’s ICH Q1A(R2) stability guidance defines a retest date as the point after which samples should be examined to confirm the material still meets specification. An expiration date is different: that’s the point after which a finished product must not be used.
The distinction is practical. Hitting a retest date doesn’t mean the material is bad. It means the paperwork has stopped vouching for it and analysis has to take over.
That same guidance tells manufacturers to avoid vague storage terms like “room temperature” or “ambient conditions” on labels. Hold that against the public certificate circulating for this chemical that lists “Storage: R.T.” and nothing else. A storage statement that imprecise is a documentation gap, and it’s worth raising with a supplier before the material arrives. We treat the same principle as non-negotiable for the lot and batch records a facility should keep.
Three questions to ask of any certificate before you decide where the material lives:
- Which salt is this, by name and CAS, and does it match the label?
- What storage condition is stated, in degrees, with a light and moisture instruction?
- What’s the retest date, and which lab and method produced the result?
If the certificate can’t answer all 3, no storage temperature will save you, because you don’t know what you’re storing.
28 Days Is a Solvent Convention, Not a Stability Result
The 28-day figure repeated across the 5-Amino-1MQ pages doesn’t come from a study on 5-Amino-1MQ. It’s the in-use period conventionally labeled on multi-entry diluents, carried over from preserved-water practice into articles about a chemical it was never measured against. 1 competitor page says so plainly. The rest present it as a property of the material.
The only published work that touches the stability of this chemical is a 2021 assay validation by Awosemo and colleagues in the Journal of Pharmaceutical and Biomedical Analysis. Their abstract reports that 5-AMQ was stable in rat plasma samples subjected to standard storage, preparation and handling conditions, with less than 15 percent variation at 2 concentration levels.
Read that carefully, because it’s narrower than it looks. It covers plasma samples under bioanalytical conditions, not a solid in a container over 2 years, and not a stock solution in DMSO. It’s a signal that the chemical isn’t fragile. It isn’t a shelf life.
Our position: anyone publishing a precise degradation rate for this material is estimating, and most aren’t saying so. We’d rather point you at the certificate and the laboratory that produced it than invent a number that sounds authoritative.
Capsules Change the Question
A capsule isn’t a container of bulk solid, and the storage answer moves with the format. Everything above describes material you weigh out: a dry solid, sealed and desiccated, at -20°C. 5-Amino-1MQ in 50mg capsules is a finished unit, already measured, with the shell doing part of the moisture work the desiccant does for bulk powder.
Two things follow. You can’t desiccate a capsule the way you desiccate loose powder, because the shell responds to humidity on its own terms. And a capsule doesn’t go into solution as a stock without being opened first, at which point you’re handling bulk solid again and the earlier guidance applies.
So read the storage condition on the capsule label and the lot certificate rather than carrying the -20°C figure across from the bulk reference material. They’re different products answering different questions, and a storage rule written for one doesn’t transfer to the other by default.
How Can You Tell If 5-Amino-1MQ Has Degraded?
By analysis, not by looking. That’s the honest answer, and no competing page gives it.
Visual inspection catches gross problems: clumping and caking from water uptake, visible particulates in a solution that was clear, a solution that’s gone cloudy. Those are real signals and worth acting on. What inspection can’t do is detect purity loss. A solid that has drifted from 99 percent to 94 percent looks identical to one that hasn’t, and with an accepted color range of faint red to dark brown on the reference material, tint is close to useless as an indicator.
If the stakes justify it, send a sample for HPLC against the original method, or re-analyze against the certificate’s specification. That’s what a retest date is for. Short of that, you’re making a risk decision rather than a measurement, and it’s worth being clear with yourself about which one you’re making.
Storing Solutions and Limiting Freeze-Thaw Cycles
Prepare only what you’ll use, aliquot it single-use, and keep the number of thaw cycles countable. The concern for this chemical isn’t denaturation. It’s 2 other things.
Water in the solvent is the first. DMSO pulls moisture from room air quickly, and a stock that sits open on a bench is a different solution an hour later than it was when you made it. Cap it, aliquot it in 1 session, and don’t thaw the whole stock to draw a fraction of it.
Microbial growth is the second, and it applies to aqueous working solutions. Keeping those at 2°C to 8°C slows biology. It doesn’t stop chemistry, and the 2 risks need separate thinking.
Solubility deserves a flag. One reference-grade listing gives DMSO solubility for the iodide at 2 mg/mL, while at least 1 other vendor page claims roughly 33 mg/mL in DMSO and water mixtures. That’s a 16-fold spread, and the practical consequence is precipitation when a concentrated stock goes cold. Check what your supplier states, prepare below it, and inspect aliquots after the first freeze.
What Nordic Chems States About Testing and Handling
Nordic Chems publishes a single standard that bears on everything above: every batch is verified by independent laboratories for identity, purity and concentration before it ships, against a 99 percent purity standard, with material manufactured in certified US laboratories. Orders ship within 24 hours and arrive in 2 to 5 business days, out of Lafayette, Louisiana.
Independent verification is the part that matters for storage, and the reason is narrow. A storage temperature is only as good as the identity behind it. If you don’t know which salt you have, the -20°C instruction is a number you’re copying rather than a condition you’ve matched to your material. That’s the whole argument of this article, and it’s why third-party identity testing sits at the front of our quality control process rather than at the end.
Research Use Only
All products on this site are for research and development use only. They are not for human consumption of any kind, not for veterinary use, and not a food, supplement or medicine. The statements on this site have not been evaluated by the FDA. Nordic Chems provides no guidance on administration of any kind, because that determination belongs to the qualified researcher handling the material.
Handle using appropriate PPE and standard laboratory safety practices. Follow applicable regulations for handling, storage, transport and disposal, and note that some materials carry state-level restrictions.
Everything above describes how to keep a laboratory material within its specification. Storing 5-Amino-1MQ correctly is a documentation and environment problem, and the certificate in the box is the document that settles it.
FAQs
Does 5-Amino-1MQ need to be refrigerated, or frozen?
The dry solid should be frozen rather than refrigerated. A reference-grade specification for the iodide salt gives -20°C, and standard practice adds sealed, dry and dark. Refrigeration at 2°C to 8°C is for working solutions in use, not for long-term storage of the solid.
What happens if 5-Amino-1MQ is left at room temperature?
No published study measures room-temperature degradation of this chemical, so any percentage you see online is an estimate presented as a fact. A short excursion in a sealed, desiccated container is a low-risk event for a small quaternary salt. The larger risk is condensation if the container is opened while cold, or water uptake if it sits open in humid air.
Does the salt form change how 5-Amino-1MQ should be stored?
Yes. The iodide salt, CAS 42464-96-0 at molecular weight 286.11, is more prone to light-driven oxidation of the counterion than other forms, which is part of why accepted appearance ranges differ so widely between certificates. Check the salt named on your own certificate before applying any storage rule or mass conversion.
Is a household freezer adequate for 5-Amino-1MQ?
A manual-defrost household freezer holding below -20°C can work for sealed, desiccated material. An auto-defrost unit is the weaker choice, because it deliberately cycles warm several times a day and moves moisture around the compartment. Temperature stability and dryness matter more than the brand of freezer.
Does 5-Amino-1MQ need amber glass or dark storage?
Store it dark. The iodide counterion oxidizes under light, and a reference-grade specification for the iodide salt accepts a color range of faint red to dark brown, which means a color shift can occur within specification. Amber glass, foil, or an opaque secondary container all achieve the same result.
How long does 5-Amino-1MQ last, and does it expire?
Published shelf-life claims for 5-Amino-1MQ range from 12 months to over 5 years, with the same publisher giving different numbers on different pages. None of them is sourced. Use the retest date on your lot certificate instead, which the FDA’s ICH Q1A(R2) guidance defines as the point to re-examine the material against its specification rather than a date it becomes unusable.
What should be checked when a shipment arrives?
Confirm the seal is intact, that the label matches the certificate on salt name, CAS number and lot, and that a storage condition is stated in degrees rather than as “room temperature.” Nordic Chems verifies every batch through independent laboratories for identity, purity and concentration before it ships, and identity is the field that decides whether a storage instruction applies to your material at all.
