Just finished today’s episode of the news on the way into the office, and I remembered that I had a paper I was reading through that was relevant to the topic. Cordyceps is pretty cool and it infects lots of different types of insects and larvae all over the world. I found a review paper not too long ago that goes over all of the most recent developments in engineering cordyceps fungus to do all sorts of stuff. The primary focus is, as with a lot of papers from the South China Agricultural university, to take some weird organism from traditional Chinese medicine and either make it produce real medicine or grow it more efficiently to sell to people. But, If you want to genetically engineer your own zombie fungus this is a good place to start.
J. Zeng et al., “Cordyceps militaris: A novel mushroom platform for metabolic engineering,” Biotechnology Advances, vol. 74, p. 108396, Sep. 2024, doi: 10.1016/j.biotechadv.2024.108396.