NEK1 and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis: Furthermore, given the few studies endorsing NEK1 as an ALS gene and the ethnic heterogeneity of genes from ALS patients, Shu et al. [44] published a mutation screening of NEK1 from Chinese ALS patients by Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR)-sanger sequencing, which led to the identification of coherent data of risk variants of NEK1 and, in total, three novel heterozygous loss-of-function mutations were identified.