Cartalax is the name under which the synthetic tripeptide L-alanyl-L-glutamyl-L-aspartic acid (Ala-Glu-Asp, AED) is catalogued; the same peptide is designated T-31 in some kidney cell studies. It belongs to the family of short peptides studied by Khavinson and colleagues, and in several papers it is compared with a polypeptide complex extracted from cartilage. The literature is small and comes almost entirely from that group. It is limited to cell and tissue culture: human mesenchymal stem cells, chondrocytes, skin fibroblasts and kidney cell cultures, mostly in models of replicative or in vitro ageing. The two chondrocyte studies are published in Russian with English abstracts.