The pro-mitochondrial impact of PGC1α in PD, whose expression levels were found to be decreased in the brains of PD patients, has been made evident in knockdown studies, in which the suppression or conditional knockdown of PGC1α led to the selective atrophy of dopaminergic neurons in the SNpc and lessened dopamine pools in the striatum of adult rodents (Shin et al., 2011; Jiang et al., 2016). This evidence concerns the gene PPARGC1A and Parkinson disease.