How would they have identified this fungus for it's properties in the Amazon rainforest? Do they just leave a piece of plastic near a tree and come back to see if anything's growing on it?
Scanning through the abstract[1], it seems pretty likely to me that they did the actual screening in a lab, and it's merely that the fungus was originally from the rainforest. In fact, one of the 21 authors on the paper is from a Peruvian university, and he's likely the one who's group originally isolated the fungus.
