In addition, Drosophila has been instrumental in the characterization of the pathway controlling mitochondrial quality and integrity driven by the Parkinson's disease associated genes Pink and Parkin (Greene et al., 2003; Clark et al., 2006) or providing compelling information even if there was no identified paralogous gene as it is the case for α-synuclein (Feany and Bender, 2000). The gene discussed is PRKN; the disease is Parkinson disease.