MAPK3 and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis: When the mTOR pathway and ALS-associated proteins were clustered into two groups, the network connections revealed several protein - protein interactions between the mTOR and ALS pathways, including the following seven protein-protein pairs (for consistency with STRING, each protein is referred to by its encoding gene): mTOR - SQSTM1, AKT - SOD1, AKT - VCP, MAPK3/ERK1 - SQSTM1, RPS6 - HNRNPA1, RPS6 - UBQLN2 and RPS6KB1 - SQSTM1 (Table 1).