Researchers at the Salk Institute built what they describe as the first microprotein atlas of the human frontal cortex in Alzheimer’s disease, mapping previously overlooked microproteins across diseased and non-diseased tissue. The study, published in Nature Aging, integrates transcriptomics, mass spectrometry, and deep-learning-predicted spectra to identify microproteins that standard proteome catalogs may miss. The atlas drew on hundreds of postmortem frontal cortex samples, including data from the Religious Orders Study/Memory and Aging Project cohort. The work also introduced or leveraged an AI-enabled microprotein-finding tool (ShortStop) to reanalyze deep brain proteomics. For neurodegeneration research, the resource is a high-throughput way to generate new molecular hypotheses around aging biology and potentially new therapeutic or biomarker targets beyond canonical genes and larger proteins.