A majority of proteins in the cell can be modified by ubiquitination, thereby altering their function or stability. This ubiquitination is controlled by both ubiquitinating and deubiquitinating enzymes (DUBs). The number of ubiquitin ligases exceeds that of DUBs by about eightfold, indicating that DUBs may have much broader substrate specificity. Despite this, DUBs have been shown to have quite...

Emerging evidence from numerous laboratories supports the notion that brain tumors arise from cells with stem cell/neuroglial progenitor cell properties ("cancer stem cells"). Two recent studies suggest that histologically similar tumors from different brain regions are molecularly distinct because they arise from distinct populations of site-restricted progenitor cells. These new findings impl...