While I am not religious, I do enjoy Jewish traditions such as reciting the blessing “motzi lechem min Haaretz” before slicing into a challah on a Friday night. I usually don’t have any specific thoughts in mind while doing this, but I suspect that will not be the case next time. I doubt that I will be able to avoid thinking about “MOTS-c” (pronounced “motzi”), a peptide discovered and named by University of Southern California gerontologist Pinchas Cohen as a nod to his heritage.

Cohen coined the term “Mitochondrial Open reading frame of the Twelve S RNA type-c” for the peptide so that it would give rise to the clever acronym MOTS-c. Of course, it is beyond our scope here to explain the scientific name, but we can delve into the importance of the peptide’s discovery, which may turn out to be a springboard for developing drugs with a potential effect on aging and longevity.

Back in 2001, professor Ikuo Nishimoto at Tokyo’s Keio University made the intriguing observation that not all parts of the brain are damaged to the same extent during the progression of Alzheimer’s disease. The hippocampus, the small seahorse shaped structure located deep within the brain where memories are consolidated, is damaged to a much greater extent than the occipital lobe at the back of the brain that is responsible for visual processing.

Nishimoto reasoned that that the occipital lobe must be producing some sort of protective factor that allows it to withstand the accumulation of beta-amyloid proteins that are the hallmark of Alzheimer’s disease. He went on to examine tissue samples extracted post-mortem from the occipital lobe of an Alzheimer’s patient from which he eventually isolated a novel peptide.

Peptides are molecules composed of chains of amino acids that are........

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