How to cite this article: Liu JF, Zheng OX, Xin JG, Chen HH, Xin JJ. How are necroptosis, immune dysfunction, and motoneuron death connected in amyotrophic lateral sclerosis ? Neuroimmunol Neuroinflammation 2017;4:109-16. Abnormal immune response/inflammation is present in patients of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). Autoimmune-related inflammation has been thought to be involved in the pathogenesis of ALS. However, how the abnormal immune responses are initiated, what specific immune cells and how these immune cells are involved in this disease have not been well understood. This is partly owing to two facts of ALS: late diagnosis and chronic nature. The late diagnosis makes it difficult to conclude whether the abnormal immune responses/inflammation is the cause or result of the disease. The chronic nature makes it difficult to determine the best timing for the detection of such autoimmune responses. To resolve these two challenges for research, the authors introduced motor nerve injury (facial nerve axotomy, FNA) into a pre-symptomatic mouse ALS model (8-week-old SOD1 G93A mice), which induces a readily detectable immune response in a predictable time period (3-14 days). The authors found that pre-symptomatic SOD1 G93A mice showed a higher basal level of T cell activation and Th17 cells than WT mice, which can be further increased by FNA. However, why these pro-inflammatory Th lymphocyte MinireviewThis is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons AttributionNonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 License, which allows others to remix, tweak, and build upon the work non-commercially, as long as the author is credited and the new creations are licensed under the identical terms.