The curious incident of epithelial polarity where there should be none.

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.