ATXN3 and neurodegenerative disease: SCA3/MJD is a protein conformational disease (proteinopathy) along with many other neurodegenerative diseases including nine polyglutamine diseases, Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, prion diseases, and additional diseases that are defined by accumulation of misfolded proteins and/or accumulation of proteins with altered conformations (Carrell and Lomas 1997; Bucciantini et al. 2002; Walsh et al. 2002; Sanchez et al. 2003).