Cyclic AMP regulates a variety of cellular responses through activation of the catalytic subunit of cAMP-dependent protein kinase. The cDNAs for two protein isoforms of the catalytic subunit, C alpha and C beta, were placed into expression vectors, and their ability to stimulate cAMP-dependent transcription of the human enkephalin promoter was examined in transiently transfected CV-1 cells. Expression vectors for C alpha and C beta that were directed by the human cytomegalovirus promoter produced up to 350- and 200-fold increases in chloramphenicol acetyltransferase activity, respectively, when cotransfected with the ENKAT-12 reporter plasmid. Transcriptional activation was shown to be dependent upon functional kinase activity by point mutations in catalytic subunit vectors which eliminated activation. Transcriptional activation by C alpha and C beta was eliminated when the cAMP response elements (CREs) were deleted from the native enkephalin promoter, but activation was recovered when this region was replaced with an oligonucleotide containing two copies of the somatostatin CRE consensus TGACGTCA. C alpha expression vectors were found to produce 2-fold greater transcriptional activation than C beta expression vectors. These results were most likely due to the cellular kinase activity produced by the catalytic subunit expression vectors and did not appear to be dependent on CRE motif or substrate specificity. In vitro mutagenesis indicates that neither C alpha nor C beta requires N-terminal myristylation for transcriptional activation, but threonine-197 is critical to subunit function.