Theca Stem Cell Differentiation into Primordial Germ Cell-like Cells Reveals GTSF1 and L1TD1 as Candidate Molecular Markers
Theca Stem Cells (TSCs) were isolated from ovarian follicles using Collagenase I and collected in sterile PBS. Total RNA was extracted using TRIzol, and RNA concentration was measured with a NanoDrop spectrophotometer. Bulk RNA sequencing was performed on the Illumina platform using paired-end 150 bp sequencing. Raw reads were quality-checked with FastQC, followed by adapter and low-quality base removal using Cutadapt. Clean reads were aligned to the human reference genome (hg38) using HISAT2, with multi-mapped reads excluded. Gene-level read counts were generated using HTSeq-count after processing the alignment files with Samtools.