A central function of palmitoylation is the regulation of protein sorting (Greaves et al., 2009b) , and it might be predicted that this simple lipid modification would have a very limited repertoire of effects on this process. However, this is not the case, and palmitoylation has been shown to act as a highly versatile sorting signal, which regulates protein trafficking to many distinct intracellular compartments. Several studies have highlighted regulatory effects of palmitoylation on either retention or anterograde trafficking of proteins at the ER-Golgi or protein cycling within the endosomal/lysosomal system (Linder and Deschenes, 2007; Greaves et al., 2009b) . Recent studies have extended our knowledge of the functional effects of palmitoylation on protein sorting by highlighting novel roles for this modification in targeting to cilia and flagella (Emmer et al., 2009; Cevik et al., 2010; Follit et al., 2010) and to the cleavage furrow of dividing cells (Hannoush and Arenas-Ramirez, 2009) .