The calpains, calcium-activated neutral proteases, are nonlysosomal, intracellular cysteine proteases. The mammalian calpains include ubiquitous, stomach-specific, and muscle-specific proteins. The ubiquitous enzymes consist of heterodimers with distinct large, catalytic subunits associated with a common small, regulatory subunit. This gene encodes the large subunit of the ubiquitous enzyme, calpain 2. Multiple heterogeneous transcriptional start sites in the 5' UTR have been reported. Two transcript variants encoding different isoforms have been found for this gene. [provided by RefSeq, Mar 2009]
Forensic Context
A study in humans identified the CAPN2 as a candidate mRNA marker for age estimation in forensic bloodstain analysis, where it was found to be decreasingly expressed with age in the RNAgE dataset [Dørum et al. DOI:10.1016/j.fsigen.2023.102976]. A separate review of human multi-omics studies also noted the CAPN2 as an aging-associated transcriptome feature, positively associated with aging in whole blood samples from a cohort of healthy people [Solovev et al. DOI:10.1016/j.mad.2019.111192]. A study in human post-mortem cardiac tissue demonstrated that the CAPN2 is a specific and sensitive diagnostic forensic marker for sudden cardiac death caused by early myocardial ischemia [Cecchi et al. DOI:10.1016/j.legalmed.2024.102508].