Although neurotoxin-based mammalian animal models of PD have settled the basis for most of our current understanding of basal ganglia function and dysfunction (Lanciego et al., 2012), these models failed to recapitulate the main neuropathological hallmarks that typically characterize PD (e.g. dopaminergic cell death driven by alpha-synuclein (αSyn) aggregation). Here, SNCA is linked to Parkinson disease.