Bacterial ubiquitination
Not one but two studies published in this week's Nature Magazine on bacterial ubiquitination to defend against phages. Ubiquitination is the first step in protein degradation, labeling the protein for targeting by a protease complex. This system is responsible for degradation of proteins that are damaged, unfolded, and useless (link). These studies show that not just Eukaryotes but bacteria too can deploy ubiquitination. I am expecting a lot of downstream applications.