Correction to: Nature Reviews Molecular Cell Biology https://doi.org/10.1038/s41580-023-00680-1, published online 12 December 2023.

In the version of the article initially published, references 80 and 81 were inadvertently swapped. Additionally, in Box 3, the sentence “for reviews of the challenges and limitations of single-cell analysis in WAT, see refs. 81,82,286–288” was originally missing “81”. These errors have been corrected in the HTML and PDF versions of the article.