Secrets of a "Zombie" Fungus Revealed

A parasitic fungus that controls the behaviour of fruit flies has, for the first time, been studied in the lab.In a fascinating preprint posted on Biorxiv, researchers Carolyn Elya et al. report how they discovered the pathogen in the wild near Berkeley, California. The fungus belongs to the species Entomophthora muscae, which is already known to prey on various species of wild flies. But Elya et al. found a way to infect laboratory flies with the disease, thus allowing them to study the fun