PINK1 and scrapie: Mitophagy, which is the specific autophagic elimination of defective mitochondria, is activated in prion-infected SMB-S15 cells and in mice infected with scrapie strains 139A and ME7 at the terminal stage of the disease, represented by the transcriptional and protein increase of the two essential elements regulating mitophagy activity: PINK1 (PTEN-induced kinase 1) and Parkin (Gao et al., 2020).