PLS3 and proximal spinal muscular atrophy: With regard to T-plastin in neurons, an interesting article has recently been published; the authors showed that high expression of T-plastin acts as a protective modifier of spinal muscular atrophy (SMA), the most frequent genetic cause of early childhood lethality, and that T-plastin is important for axonogenesis, as its overexpression rescues the axon length and outgrowth defects in neurons of the SMA mouse [41].