The fungus Rhizopus germinates and forms hyphae as part of the infection process.
Creationist mode: 
Here is a discovery that should thrill devotees of the putative divine malevolence that intelligently [sic] designs the pathogens that make us sick. It is published in an open access paper in the journal Current Biology, by a team of researchers from the Universities of Birmingham, Exeter and Sheffield, led by Dr. Herbert Itabangi of Birmingham University School of Biosciences' Institute of Microbiology and Infection. It is the mechanism which enables a soil fungus to become pathogenic by allying itself with a bacterium in a symbiotic relationship.
The soil fungus is Rhizopus which, when it plays host to the bacterium, Ralstonia, can avoid being consumed by a predatory amoeba, Dictyostelium. Using the same trick, Rhizopus is able to avoid being consumed and destroyed by the cells of our immune system and so become pathogenic on humans and cause mucormycosis, and in particular the condition known as "black fungus", a complication of COVID-19.
As the Exeter University news release explains:
The microscopic world resembles our world in some surprising ways. The environment around us is inhabited by microbes living in complex communities - some friendly and some not so friendly. Microbes compete with each other for resources and must also hide from or fight predators. One example of this is the fungus Rhizopus, which grows in the soil and on spoiled food and is the cause of "black fungus" outbreaks in covid patients.The scientists' findings were published yesterday in Current Biology:
In the soil, its predator is the amoeba Dictyostelium, a single celled microbe that can move through the soil and engulf Rhizopus, devouring it for nutrients. Scientists from the universities of Exeter and Birmingham found Rhizopus fights back against this predator by partnering with a bacteria called Ralstonia in a two way partnership. By living inside Rhizopus, Ralstonia hides from the predator. In return, Ralstonia makes a toxin that Rhizopus can use to neutralize the predator, preventing it from feeding on the pair.
This work is really important because while its been known that fungal-bacterial partnerships in the soil impact plant disease for many years, this is the first example of a bacterial-fungal partnership contributing to mucormycosis in humans. We hope this will help us develop better strategies for treating this devastating disease.Why does this matter to human disease? Our immune cells are very much like the predator Dictyostelium: They seek out, engulf, and destroy foreign microbes that enter our bodies, protecting us from infection. This means that Rhizopus and Ralstonia can use the same strategy to avoid predators in the soil to evade our own immune systems. By learning to fight off predators in the soil, Rhizopus has also learned how to cause disease in humans.
Dr Elizabeth Ballou, Co-author
Institute of Microbiology and Infection
School of Biosciences
University of Birmingham, Edgbaston, Birmingham, UK
This work showed that when its partnership with Ralstonia is disrupted, animals infected with Rhizopus are able to survive this devastating disease. The hope is that by better understanding the ecology and strategies for survival that Rhizopus and other pathogens use in their normal environments, we will be better prepared to combat these microbes when they cause human disease.
HighlightsQuite brilliant, eh? Not only does the divine malevolence get a new pathogenic species but it causes additional suffering and deaths amongst the victims of its SARS-VoV-2 virus that causes COVI-19. That's three different organisms, all working together to make people have a slow, lingering death! No wonder Creationists are so much in awe of its creative genius!
Summary
- Bacterial endosymbionts protect fungal spores from phagocytes
- A secreted factor blocks growth and killing by environmental amoebas
- Endosymbionts improve fungal stress resistance
- Endosymbiosis also allows the evasion of vertebrate immune cells and virulence in vivo
Opportunistic infections by environmental fungi are a growing clinical problem, driven by an increasing population of people with immunocompromising conditions. Spores of the Mucorales order are ubiquitous in the environment but can also cause acute invasive infections in humans through germination and evasion of the mammalian host immune system. How they achieve this and the evolutionary drivers underlying the acquisition of virulence mechanisms are poorly understood. Here, we show that a clinical isolate of Rhizopus microsporus contains a Ralstonia pickettii bacterial endosymbiont required for virulence in both zebrafish and mice and that this endosymbiosis enables the secretion of factors that potently suppress growth of the soil amoeba Dictyostelium discoideum, as well as their ability to engulf and kill other microbes. As amoebas are natural environmental predators of both bacteria and fungi, we propose that this tri-kingdom interaction contributes to establishing endosymbiosis and the acquisition of anti-phagocyte activity. Importantly, we show that this activity also protects fungal spores from phagocytosis and clearance by human macrophages, and endosymbiont removal renders the fungal spores avirulent in vivo. Together, these findings describe a new role for a bacterial endosymbiont in Rhizopus microsporus pathogenesis in animals and suggest a mechanism of virulence acquisition through environmental interactions with amoebas.
Itabangi, Herbert; Sephton-Clark, Poppy C.S.; Tamayo, Diana P.; Zhou, Xin; Starling, Georgina P.; Mahamoud, Zamzam; Insua, Ignacio; Probert, Mark; Correia, Joao; Moynihan, Patrick J.; Gebremariam, Teclegiorgis; Gu, Yiyou; Ibrahim, Ashraf S.; Brown, Gordon D.; King, Jason S.; Ballou, Elizabeth R.; Voelz, Kerstin
A bacterial endosymbiont of the fungus Rhizopus microsporus drives phagocyte evasion and opportunistic virulence
Current Biology 2022; DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2022.01.028
Copyright: © 2022 The authors. Published by Elsevier Inc.
Open access
Reprinted under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0)
Creationist mode: 
But the question as always, is why is their putative designer going to such extraordinary lengths just to make us sick and suffer, when surely, if it were the same entity as the alleged omni-benevolent, loving god of the Bible and Qur'an who only wants what's best for its creation, it would be working to decrease the suffering in the world, not looking for better ways to overcome the defences against its pathogenic creations it supposedly gave us to protect us from them!
The simple answer, if you haven't worked it out yet, is that no such creator, benevolent, malevolent of indifferent is behind these organisms and how they treat us a resources in which to live and reproduce. All of this is the result of a utilitarian natural process in which neither intelligence nor planning play any part. All that is needed for that process to work is that the environment naturally favours those variants that are best fitted by chance to produce the most offspring in competition with other variants for the available resources. The winner is the variant that predominates over time.
And that process, is, of course, evolution by natural selection.
Quite why Creationists prefer to hold the view that makes their god look so hateful remains a mystery. I wonder what such a god would think of them, if it really existed.
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