To determine whether AhR KO has an effect on cell differentiation and/or global gene expression profiles in individual sorted colonic stem cells

To study the role of Ahr in intestinal stem cell fate determination, we generated inducible, stem cell-specific Ahr-/- KO mice and then used scRNAseq to generate data for them. We conducted scTenifoldKnk analysis to knock out Ahr from the scGRN of WT mice and identified 53 top genes and associated pathways. We also conducted GESA analysis and identified 60 non-redundant functional gene sets, including many related to cell cycle and cell proliferation signaling pathways. It showed that enterocytes were the most significant hit, suggesting that Ahr KO induces a change in the expression of enterocyte marker genes, which may be responsible for the alteration of enterocyte differentiation fate. Taken together, our comprehensive analysis revealed the multifactorial functions of Ahr as a key player of enterocyte cell differentiation and proliferation, which is consistent with the known functions of Ahr. Single-cell transcriptome analysis on colonic stem cells from five wild-type (WT) and five Ahr-/- gene knockout (KO) mice