The study marks a step forward in improving treatments for the disease, which affects roughly 30% of adults worldwide. Only one medication for the condition has approval from the US Food and Drug Administration, and it has limited effectiveness. Before this study, the role of the fungus, called Fusarium foetens, in the human microbiome and its interactions with metabolism were poorly understood. 'We had little understanding of how this fungus evolved to colonize the intestines of healthy individuals,' says co-author Jiang Changtao, a microbiologist at Peking University Third Hospital in Beijing. Previous studies have shown that gut yeast ' a type of fungus ' can aggravate alcoholic fatty liver disease2, but whether filamentous fungi such as F. foetens could affect liver conditions was unclear. Changtao and his colleagues cultured F. foetens from human faeces using an isolation and culturing system that they designed. They gave the fungus to mice with a type of fatty liver disease...
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