MOTS-c
A peptide. 16 amino acids. Made from mitochondrial DNA. Research only. Not a protocol.
Simple words
Most of your DNA lives in the nucleus. Mitochondria — the parts of the cell that make energy — have a tiny bit of their own DNA. MOTS-c is a 16-bead peptide read from that tiny code. Changhan Lee and Pinchas Cohen’s lab at USC described it in 2015.
In mice it changed how muscle handles sugar and how the animals handled a fatty diet. People sell it as a “metabolic” vial. That is the mouse story, compressed.
What researchers studied
Lee, Cohen, and colleagues: mice, diet, insulin resistance, AMPK (a protein cells use when energy is low). Later work asked whether MOTS-c shows up in exercise. Human outcome trials that match a GLP-1 program are not the 2015 paper.
Papers
Lee, Zeng, Drew, Cohen, et al., 2015 — MOTS-c, metabolism, obese mice. Cell Metabolism. Free at PMC4350682.
Reynolds, Lai, et al., 2021 — MOTS-c and physical performance in mice. Nature Communications.
What this is not
Not NAD+. Not SLU-PP-332. Not a human-proven exercise drug. This page does not tell you how much to take.