SOD1 and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis: ER stress is believed to play an important role in several neurodegenerative diseases, including sporadic ALS [4, 26, 59, 69], and familiar ALS caused by mutations in Cu/Zn superoxide dismutase [8, 29, 48, 55] or vesicle-associated membrane protein-associated protein B [27, 45, 62].