Soil-Dwelling Fungus Rode Joplin Tornado to Unexpected Human Home

By Jennifer Frazer

July 30,2015; 7:03AM,EDT

Photo Credit: Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons
The most unexpected beneficiary of the EF-5 tornado that struck Joplin, Missouri, on May 22, 2011 was a fungus named Apophysomyces.
It may, in fact, have been the only beneficiary. The mile-wide tornado touched down just to the west of Joplin that day and rampaged through town. The people of Joplin endured a maelstrom of metal, wood, and rock hurled at over 200 miles per hour. 158 people died and more than 1,100 were injured in this single storm; almost half the town was destroyed.
In the weeks after, doctors started to notice something strange among a few of those injured. Their wounds were blackening, infected by fungi so aggressive that the flesh actually sprouted fuzzy white mold, as if they were a forgotten orange or loaf of bread.
Doctors sampled the wounds, grew the fungus in the lab, and were astonished to find 13 people had all become infected by a single fungus rarely seen in humans: Apophysomyces trapeziformis. Only 74 cases had ever been recorded. This time, the fungus would go on to kill or contribute to the deaths of five of the 13.
Apophysomyces is a zygomycete, one of the five major groups of fungi. Zygomycetes get their name from the special reproductive structure in which they have sex and sexual spores: the zygosporangium. It looks like a big dark nut created at the junction where two fungal filaments of opposite mating type (i.e. sex) meet.

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Many zygomycetes are saprobes that make a living eating dead plants. A few parasitize insects or other fungi. Under normal conditions, Apophysomyces scavanges dead plants and can no more infect a human than order a pizza. That rulebook gets tossed out, however, when an object traveling in excess of 200 miles per hour injects the fungus directly into human flesh.
Once comfortably ensconced in the human body, it wastes no time in taking over the place. The torrid conditions don't seem to bother it, nor does the presence of a fully armed and operational immune system. According to Glenn Roberts, a professor of laboratory medicine, pathology, and microbiologiy and a consultant in the division of clinical microbiology at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, in the laboratory Apophysomyces is referred to as a "lid lifter" because within a matter of hours the fungus can grow from a single spore to a mass of filaments that literally raises the roof of its Petri dish and crawls down the sides.
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