Compound
Everything we've written on Mitochondrial-derived peptides — 8 articles covering the mechanism, the evidence, comparisons, and practical considerations.
8 articles
Mitochondrial healthWhat people are reporting about HumaninThis article summarizes experiences reported in public online communities including Reddit, longevity forums, and discussion boards. We are not advocating human use of any compound discussed here. Many of the peptides discussed are not FDA-approved for the uses described, and some are explicitly not approved for human or veterinary use. What follows is a synthesis of what people have reported, presented to give readers context on the public conversation — not as guidance, not as evidence of safety or efficacy, and not as a recommendation. Decisions about any compound should be made with a qualified prescribing provider after a full medical evaluation.8 min readMitochondrial healthHumanin — the mitochondrial peptide that protects neuronsIn 2001, in a laboratory in Tokyo, a researcher named Yuichi Hashimoto was trying to understand why some neurons survive exposure to amyloid-beta and some don't. Alzheimer's disease research at that point was already deeply invested in the amyloid hypothesis — the idea that the accumulation of amyloid-beta peptide fragments is the initiating event in the disease — but the mechanism of neuronal death was still being worked out. Hashimoto's group was screening a library of expressed sequences from the brain tissue of Alzheimer's patients, looking for something that could explain or counteract the toxicity. What they found was not what they were looking for.8 min readCognitive supportHumanin in Alzheimer's and neurodegenerative researchYou forget a name at a party and you're not sure whether it's nothing or the beginning of something. The forgetting itself isn't new — names have always been slippery — but the anxiety about the forgetting is new, and there's a quality to it that's different from forgetting where you put your keys. Keys have a logic to where they could be. A name you knew ten minutes ago has no logic to offer you. You stand there and there's just a gap, and the gap has a weight to it.8 min readMitochondrial healthMitochondrial DNA — your second genome and why it matters for agingMost people learn it once in high school biology and never return to it: mitochondria have their own DNA. The fact gets filed away alongside the powerhouse-of-the-cell mnemonic and mostly stays there, which is a pity. Because the implications of that second genome — separate from the nuclear DNA in your chromosomes, inherited through an entirely different pathway, subject to its own distinct vulnerabilities — turn out to be one of the more important threads running through the biology of aging.7 min readMitochondrial healthWhat people are reporting about MOTS-cThis article summarizes experiences reported in public online communities including Reddit, longevity forums, and discussion boards. We are not advocating human use of any compound discussed here. Many of the peptides discussed are not FDA-approved for the uses described, and some are explicitly not approved for human or veterinary use. What follows is a synthesis of what people have reported, presented to give readers context on the public conversation — not as guidance, not as evidence of safety or efficacy, and not as a recommendation. Decisions about any compound should be made with a qualified prescribing provider after a full medical evaluation.7 min readMitochondrial healthMOTS-c in longevity stacks — what's being exploredThe longevity protocol world has a stacking problem. Not a problem in the sense that stacking is necessarily wrong — combining compounds that address different mechanisms is conceptually sound in medicine — but a problem in the sense that the reasoning often runs backward. The aspiration comes first. The compounds follow. The mechanism gets retrofitted to justify what was already going to happen. When you're dealing with compounds that have thin human evidence and strong preclinical data, this pattern matters enormously, because it's the difference between a rationally assembled protocol and an expensive bet dressed up in biological language.7 min readMitochondrial healthMOTS-c in plain English — mitochondrial-derived peptides explainedYour mitochondria are not quiet. They're not just burning fuel and staying out of the way. They're running a continuous metabolic read on the cell's energy state and broadcasting updates — and those updates, it turns out, include peptides that circulate through the body and communicate with tissues that have nothing to do with where the mitochondria physically sit. MOTS-c is one of those peptides. Understanding what it actually does requires starting with what the cell does when energy runs low.8 min readOrigins and discoveryMOTS-c — the peptide your mitochondria write themselvesIn 2015, a research team at the University of Southern California published a paper in Cell Metabolism that quietly changed the way biologists had to think about the mitochondrion. The paper was not loudly announced outside specialist circles. It didn't generate the cultural noise that cancer immunotherapy or CRISPR news generated that same year. But what Pinchas Cohen, Changhan Lee, and their colleagues described was a genuine reclassification — a finding that required updating a story about cellular biology that had been told, largely without revision, since the 1960s.8 min read