Recent studies have shown that genetic variants of ATG5 play a role in predisposition to various neurodegenerative diseases such as Parkinson's disease (PD; Chen et al., 2013), autoimmune diseases such as systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE; López et al., 2013), and inflammatory diseases such as asthma (Martin et al., 2012). The gene discussed is ATG5; the disease is systemic lupus erythematosus.