Interestingly, inactivation or loss of RPL22 in cancer is associated with increased expression of RPL22L1 and inclusion of exon 6 in MDM4 (Ghandi et al., 2019), an event that promotes MDM4 expression by preventing formation of a ‘short’ MDM4 mRNA isoform (MDM4s) that is destroyed by nonsense-mediated decay (Rallapalli et al., 1999). Here, RPL22L1 is linked to cancer.