Hi there! Fold change is a way of measuring how much something has changed. Imagine you have a bunch of toys and you want to see which ones have changed the most. Fold change helps you figure that out by comparing how many times bigger or smaller something is.
Let's say you have a toy car that used to have four wheels, but now has eight. That means the number of wheels has doubled, which we can also call a fold change of two. If it had gone from four wheels to sixteen wheels, that would be a fold change of four, because 16 is four times bigger than 4.
You can also use fold change to compare things that have gotten smaller. Let's say you had a toy that used to be ten centimeters tall, but now it's only five centimeters tall. The height has been cut in half, which we can call a fold change of 0.5.
So, fold change is just a way of comparing two things to see how they've changed. It tells you how many times bigger or smaller something is compared to its original size.