C9orf72 HRE expansions account for a significant proportion of both familial and apparently sporadic ALS (SALS) patients and not unexpectedly, there are number of common pathways of dysfunction shared by both groups of patients including oxidative stress, mitochondrial dysfunction, and motor neuron toxicity in vitro when co-cultured with patient derived astrocytes (Meyer et al., 2014; Lopez-Gonzalez et al., 2016; Onesto et al., 2016; Konrad et al., 2017). This evidence concerns the gene C9orf72 and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis.