What can we learn from a fungus that eats most of the flies in your home from the inside, turns them into zombies and then lures other flies to necrophilic intercourse? Possibly quite a lot, according to researchers at the University of Copenhagen.

Henrik De Fine Licht has been researching this very special fungus for years, a fly fungus—Entomophthora muscae—that takes over the behavior of flies before killing them.

Most recently, he and a group of American research colleagues have succeeded in mapping the fungus' genome, an achievement in itself because the massive genome is roughly 25 times larger than that of most other fungi. The goal is to find out how the fungus manipulates fly behavior.

"The genome is a catalogue of all the genes found in the fungus, which tells us something about the the organism's capabilities. Such a catalogue can better equip us to look at which genes are active in a fly's brain at the point when the fungus transforms it into this zombie-like state. And in this way, we hope to understand how it can do such a wild thing," says Associate Professor De Fine Licht of the University of Copenhagen's Department of Plant and Environmental Sciences.