As we near a complete understanding of plant tran-scriptomes and their corresponding proteomes, a remaining frontier in plant biology will be the in-depth definition of the posttranslational modifications that help generate the diverse array of appropriately functioning proteins from more finite genomic information. It is now obvious that plant proteins are subject to a wide array of possible modifications that regulate their structure, activity, interactions, location, and/or half-life. These alterations are often genetically predetermined, transient , and highly dynamic, thus providing near unlimited layers of control across the life span of individual proteins. The continually expanding list of over 200 possibilities include the covalent addition of methyl, acetyl, phosphate, and glycosyl moieties, fatty acids, vitamin cofactors, nucleosides, and even other proteins. The first polypeptide modifier to be discovered was ubiquitin (Ub), a highly conserved, 76-amino acid protein ubiquitously present in eukaryotes (Hershko and Ciechanover, 1998; Smalle and Vierstra, 2004; Vierstra, 2009). Via an intricate enzymatic cascade, Ub becomes attached to a multitude of targets through an isopeptide bond between its C-terminal Gly residue and one or more accessible Lys residues in its targets. This addition can then be reversed by a family of deubiquitylating proteases (DUBs) that uniquely recognize and cleave the bond linking the two moieties, thus generating a reaction cycle akin to those involving protein kinases and phosphatases. Elucidation of the Ub enzymatic paradigm was followed by the discovery that it represents just one member from a constellation of peptide tags that become reversibly attached to other intracellular constituents , including lipids and prenyl groups, in some cases using parallel chemistries indicative of a common ancestor (Downes and Vierstra, 2005; Kerscher et al., 2006; Burroughs et al., 2012). In plants, these Ub-like modifiers (UBLs) currently include RUB (for related to ubiquitin, or Nedd8 in yeast [Saccharomyces cerevisiae] and animals), SUMO (for small ubiquitin-like modifier), ATG8 (for autophagy8) and ATG12, MUB (for membrane-anchored ubiquitin-fold protein), UFM1 (for ubiquitin-fold modifier1), URM1 (for ubiquitin-related modifier1), HUB1 (for homology to ubiquitin1), and a diverse assortment of proteins that harbor structurally related folds fused translationally to other domains. The varied processes managed by these modifiers are extraordinary , ranging from cellular housekeeping, nutrient recycling, and sulfur chemistry to selective protein turnover, transcriptional regulation, chromatin re-modeling, and RNA metabolism (Miura et al., 2007a; Hochstrasser, 2009; Vierstra, 2009; Li and Vierstra, 2012). In this review, I provide a glimpse into the importance of these modifiers in plant biology, an emerging appreciation for how these modifiers intersect to expand their influence, and how they might have evolved from prokaryotic progenitors. Specific examples supporting these themes are ...