Astrocyte pathology has been suggested to be an important feature in Alzheimer’s disease (Pekny et al. 2016): astrocytes are associated with Alzheimer neuritic plaques (Cullen 1997), interlaminar astrocytes are specifically lost in the disease (Colombo et al. 2002), astrocytes accumulate abnormally phosphorylated tau protein (Kovacs et al. 2017) and mercury has been shown to hyperphosphorylate tau (Fujimura et al. 2009). Here, MAPT is linked to Alzheimer disease.