Protein ubiquitination controls many intracellular processes, including cell cycle progression, transcriptional activation, and signal transduction. This dynamic process, involving ubiquitin conjugating enzymes and deubiquitinating enzymes, adds and removes ubiquitin. Deubiquitinating enzymes are cysteine proteases that specifically cleave ubiquitin from ubiquitin-conjugated protein substrates. The protein encoded by this gene belongs to a DUB subfamily characterized by an ovarian tumor (OTU) domain. Alternative splicing results in multiple transcript variants. [provided by RefSeq, Jan 2013]