Our investigation recapitulated the effect of AAV-α-synuclein overexpression on STN basal firing properties by increasing the proportion of burst firing neurons, mimicking findings in neurotoxin models and PD patients (Hollerman and Grace, 1992; Bergman et al., 1994; Ni et al., 2000; Iancu et al., 2005; Brazhnik et al., 2014; Pan et al., 2016). Here, SNCA is linked to Parkinson disease.