The role of CARMA2/CARD14 in NF-kB activation signalling

We focused our attention on the identification of two splice variants of CARMA 2, and their involvement in the activation of NF-kB during ER stress. CARMA2/CARD14 is a protein of 1004 ammino acidc residues, to verify the presence of different splice variants derived from the CARMA2 gene, we performed an extensive transcription – polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) analysis of mRNA isolated from human cell lines using CARMA2/CARD14 exon - specific primers. These analysis revealed the existence of two splice variants of CARMA2/CARD14: one variant contains the same translational start of Carma2fl but contains an alternative stop codon into an additional exon (alternative exon 15); this splice variant encodes for a polypeptide corresponding to amino acids 1-740 of CARMA2fl and we called these variant Carma2short (Carma2sh); the second variant skips the exons 1- 4 because it contains an alternative translational start in exon 5 and it also includes an additional exon containing an alternative stop codon. The protein encoded by this transcript would lack the CARD domain, includes amino acids Met Val of CARMA2fl and contains an unique carboxy terminus; so we named this variant CARMA2cardless (CARMA2cl).