In this issue, Almasoud et al. (https://doi.org/10.1083/jcb.202504139) report a surprising finding that epithelial cell polarity is present in a tissue with no known polarized function, in a cell type that was assumed to show a distinct lack of such polarity—the mesenchymal cells of the Drosophila fat body. Exceptions such as this help to broaden our understanding of the use of regulators and pathways we thought we fully understood.
Ball et al. (Tue,) studied this question.