Protein methylation in the nervous system

This chapter describes the types of protein methylation that might be confronted in investigations of the nervous system, and summarizes technical approaches that have proven useful in elucidating the chemistries and identities of methylated proteins. Several distinct protein methyltransferase activities have been described in nervous tissues, and there are undoubtedly more to be discovered. It has often been the case that identification of a methylation pathway in the nervous system has led to the discovery of a similar system in some other tissue. An excellent recent example is the characterization in the brain of isoprenylated protein methyltransferases (Ben et al., 1993; Paz et al., 1993; Klein et al., 1994), which have proven to have important activities in many other cells (Clarke, 1992b).