SHMOOSE

Where it comes from

Made in

Brain and other tissues, reported in 2022

Sent out by

Unknown; it is found in cerebrospinal fluid, where the level tracks with age

Acts on

• Mitochondrial inner membrane
• Neurons

What it does

• Supports mitochondrial respiration and neuron survival, and raises oxygen consumption in cells ¹
• A variant (D47N), carried by about a quarter of people of European ancestry, goes with roughly 30 percent higher odds of Alzheimer’s disease across four cohorts and with faster thinning of the parahippocampal and entorhinal cortex ¹
• The first mitochondrial-encoded micropeptide identified directly by mass spectrometry, which is why it stands on firmer ground than the SHLPs ¹

In medicine

• None. Cerebrospinal fluid SHMOOSE has been measured in people and tracks with age, with CSF tau and with white matter change, but only inside research cohorts ¹
• D47N is a common variant of small effect, not a test anybody is offered ¹

Beyond the body’s own use

• Nothing is in trials. The question is whether SHMOOSE accounts for part of the mitochondrial contribution to Alzheimer’s disease, long suspected from variants whose mechanism was never found ¹
• It is not taken outside medicine. Given to rats it shifted gene expression in the hypothalamus, which is a long way from a treatment ¹
• The same approach, reading a mitochondrial variant as a change to a peptide rather than to an RNA, produced the SHLP2 finding in Parkinson’s disease, so this is a method as much as a molecule ²