Neuroscientists, scientists who study how the brain works, have been very interested in learning how memories are stored in the brain. However, neuroscientists have only very recently begun to study forgetting. To understand how the human brain forgets, we can study how fruit flies forget. Fruit flies are awesome, small insects that are great for scientific research. They grow very fast in the laboratory and we can produce as many flies as we want. Their genetic material, or DNA, is also very easy to change. DNA is a very long, thin chemical that contains the instructions to build any living organism. DNA contains genes, which are sections of the DNA that tell a cell how to make a protein. The instructions contained in the DNA of the flies can be changed in the lab. Genes can be removed, making a mutant fly. In this way, we can explore what happens to a fly if a piece of these instructions is removed.

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Go to source: https://kids.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/frym.2017.00063