The ‘Golden Death’ Bacterium Found in a Rotten Apple

This “spectacular” pathogen dissolves its host from inside out. For several years in the fall, Marie-Anne Félix would walk through an apple orchard near Paris in search of rotten fruit. Félix, an evolutionary biologist at École normale supérieure, studies tiny, translucent worms called nematodes. These worms feed on bacteria, so they tend to congregate, as their prey do, on the flesh of decaying fruit. In 2009, Félix picked up one such apple rich in nematodes. She took samples back to her lab, where she tried to grow worms and bacteria from the apple in petri dishes.

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