Although, defective autophagy is seen in PD patients and in vivo studies show that impairments in microglial autophagy specifically, leads to neurodegeneration in mice, there is still a loose connection between impaired autophagy in microglia and PD in humans, with no studies investigating alpha-synuclein’s role in this paradigm (Karabiyik et al., 2017; Qin et al., 2021). The gene discussed is SNCA; the disease is Parkinson disease.