Comments on 'MAP3K2-regulated intestinal stromal cells define a distinct stem cell niche'

For a long period of time,intestinal mesenchymal stromal cells (IMSC) have been considered as a relatively simple and homogeneous group of cells.These cells could effectively regulate intestinal homeostasis and epithelium integrity via producing growth factors and cytokines(Powell et al.,2011).With the help of sin-gle-cell transcriptomics studies,it has now been clear that IMSC are quite com-plex and heterogeneous (Kinchen et al.,2018).However,the detailed cellular and molecular mechanisms that regulate the function of these cells remain poorly un-derstood.Therefore,the ability to perturb and evaluate the in vivo function of IMSC is critical to the understanding of intesti-nal stem cell niche and the etiology of the inflammatory bowel diseases as well as colitis-associated colorectal cancer.