This year's Nobel Prize in Chemistry has been awarded to Aaron Ciechanover, Avram Herskho and Irwin Rose for the discovery of ubiquitin-mediated protein degradation. In a series of groundbreaking experiments these scientists described the basic principles for a unique posttranslational modification based on the conjugation of the small protein ubiquitin to proteins deemed for degradation. Although ubiquitin started in 1980 as an unusual modification of certain proteins, it is now clear that it functions as a signal for degradation when it forms a polymer. Hundreds of proteins are involved in the controlled destruction of ubiquitin-labelled proteins in the cell. And hundreds of other proteins are involved in protein modification by mono-ubiquitin, so that other processes, such as the formation of another degradation compartment, the lysosome, can proceed normally.