“…Mutations of the UCH-L1 gene have been associated with familial Parkinson's disease (Lansbury and Brice, 2002) and with other neurodegenerative disorders characterized by the formation of protein aggregates, including spinocerebellar ataxia (Fernandez-Funez et al, 2000) and Huntington's disease (Naze et al, 2002). In addition, high levels of UCH-L1 have been detected in a variety of human malignancies including neuroblastoma (Yanagisawa et al, 1998), colon carcinoma (Yamazaki et al, 2002), non-small-cell-lung carcinoma (Brichory et al, 2001;Sasaki et al, 2001), pancreatic carcinoma (Tezel et al, 2000), prostate and breast carcinomas (Schumacher et al, 1994;Aumuller et al, 1999) and renal carcinoma (D'Andrea et al, 1997), and appear to be associated with the more malignant and invasive forms of these tumors. The physiological targets of UCH-L1 are unknown.…”