MAPK8 and proximal spinal muscular atrophy: To shed light on the cell death type ongoing in SMA and understand the potential role of JNK pathway in the disease pathogenesis, by WB analysis we first quantified the p-c-Jun protein fraction (a JNK target) in spinal cords of P12 SMA and WT pups: we found an increase of about 20% in relative phosphorylation intensity in SMA group compared to WT (p = 0.014, Figure 1A), confirming the results of Genabai et al.’s (2015) group.