Short Review Molecular Biology of Myelin Proteins from the Central Nervous System

Myelinogenesis is a complex, developmentally reg-ulated, neurobiological process involving the coordi-nated expression of myelin protein genes and the genes for several enzymes in biosynthetic pathways leading to the synthesis of myelin-specific lipids. In the past several years, the value of this neurobiologi-cal system for molecular genetic and cell biological studies has become increasingly recognized, and the genes encoding four of the myelin proteins have been isolated and their structures determined. Through al-ternative splicing mechanisms, each of these genes produces a family of mRNA transcripts that encode two or more polypeptide isoforms. In several cases, the production of the alternatively spliced transcripts is developmentally regulated, leading to changes in