PINK1 and Parkinson disease: In an effort to generate a better animal model of PD and a tool for studying potential mechanisms of disease, the Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Research sponsored the generation and initial characterization of PINK1-/- rats as a model of loss-of-function PINK1 mutations causally linked to recessively inherited PD (Valente et al., 2004; Dave et al., 2014).