Zoe Donaldson wants to know what happens in the brain to make individuals pair up. When she was a graduate student at Emory University, she settled on two vole species—one monogamous, one promiscuous—as the perfect study subjects for answering such a question. But to definitively connect their social behavior back to gene expression in the brain, she knew she would have to manipulate the vole genome—a major challenge, because scientists had not yet devised tools for inserting genes and turning them on and off in voles as they routinely did in mice.

中文翻译：

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神经科学家在生命之树上寻求更多分支：多样化的研究物种提供了进化的见解。

佐伊·唐纳森（Zoe Donaldson）想知道大脑中发生了什么，使个体配对。当她在埃默里大学（Emory University）读研究生时，她以两种田鼠为生-一夫一妻制，一种杂种-是回答此类问题的理想学习科目。但是，要想将他们的社会行为与大脑中的基因表达确定地联系起来，她知道她必须操纵田鼠基因组，这是一个重大挑战，因为科学家们还没有设计出用于插入基因以及在田鼠中打开和关闭基因的工具。通常在小鼠身上做。