The proteasome is a multicatalytic proteinase complex with a highly ordered ring-shaped 20S core structure. The core structure is composed of 4 rings of 28 non-identical subunits; 2 rings are composed of 7 alpha subunits and 2 rings are composed of 7 beta subunits. Proteasomes are distributed throughout eukaryotic cells at a high concentration and cleave peptides in an ATP/ubiquitin-dependent process in a non-lysosomal pathway. An essential function of a modified proteasome, the immunoproteasome, is the processing of class I MHC peptides. This gene encodes a member of the proteasome B-type family, also known as the T1B family, that is a 20S core beta subunit in the proteasome. This catalytic subunit is not present in the immunoproteasome and is replaced by catalytic subunit 3i (proteasome beta 8 subunit). Multiple transcript variants encoding different isoforms have been found for this gene. [provided by RefSeq, Jan 2009].