MAPT and Alzheimer disease: Tau protein is a microtubule-associated protein encoded by the MAPT gene that carries out a myriad of physiological functions and has been linked to certain pathologies collectively termed tauopathies, including Alzheimer’s disease, frontotemporal dementia, Huntington’s disease, progressive supranuclear palsy, etc. Alternative splicing is a physiological process by which cells generate several transcripts from one single gene and may in turn give rise to different proteins from the same gene.