To circumvent these problems, an in utero lentiviral‐mediated strategy has been used to analyse the role of the nectin‐afadin cell adhesion complex on palatal development; loss of afadin or combined loss of nectin1/nectin4 function from the palatal epithelia resulted in highly penetrant cleft palate as a result of delayed palatal shelf elevation secondary to intra‐oral epithelial adhesions (Lough et al., 2020). Here, AFDN is linked to cleft palate.