Concordant with prior studies describing dysregulation of metallothioneins in PD [10, 43], we observed seven metallothionein genes out of the 19 present in this gene family (http://www.genenames.org/cgi-bin/genefamilies/set/638) showing significantly increased abundance in PD samples compared with controls (MT1A, MT1E, MT1F, MT1G, MT1M, MT1X, MT2A; See Additional file 3: Table S3). Here, MT2A is linked to Parkinson disease.