All primer pairs were chosen to keep the melt temperature (Tm) between 58 and 62°C (calculated using http://www.basic.northwestern.edu/biotools/oligocalc.html) and products in the 135 ± 20 nt size range. Primers were designed to delineate the unique 5' end of ΔKalirins (AF229255.1), the spectrin domains common to all forms of Kalirin with nine spectrin-like repeats (U88157.1), and sequences unique to the 3' ends of Kal7 (AF230644.1), Kal8 (U88157.1), Kal9 (AF232668.1), and Kal12 (NM_032062.2); rat sequences were used to identify the corresponding mouse sequences, which all appear as Ensembl sequences at http://www.ensembl.org/Mus_musculus/Info/. Additional primer pairs identifying transcripts which extend beyond a unique end (e.g. Exon 33 to Exon 34, Exon 38-39, Exon 51-52) instead of terminating in a specific 3' end, corroborated the major findings (not shown).
