Necroptosis is a form of regulated necrotic cell death, in which RIPK1/RIPK3 kinases mediate activation of the MLKL kinase (Pasparakis & Vandenabeele, 2015), and is emerging as a relevant pathway of cell death in other neurodegenerative conditions, such as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (Ito et al., 2016; Re et al., 2014). The gene discussed is RIPK1; the disease is amyotrophic lateral sclerosis.