“…Central to this is the stem cell niche, which includes a variety of soluble and insoluble mediators (Sailaja et al, 2016) such as those of the Wnt/β‐catenin and Notch pathways (Andersson‐Rolf et al, 2017; Spit et al, 2018; van der Heijden & Vermeulen, 2019) and components of the microenvironment such as the extracellular matrix molecules and their various cell receptors (Benoit, Groulx, et al, 2012; Cloutier et al, 2019). Collectively, these mediators drive the expression of specific transcription factors such as CDX2 (Boudreau et al, 2007) and modulate epigenetic mechanisms (Roostaee et al, 2016) that control cell proliferation and differentiation along the crypt‐villus axis.…”