You can see by looking at this moldy apple that fungi like to feed on fruit sugars.
Many forms of life, from bugs down to the tiniest microbes, like fruit as much as we do. Fruit is full of sugar, and many microorganisms use sugar as their food source.
How yeast ferments fruit
We saw earlier how yeast likes to feed on the starch in flour. Yeast cells will also feed on fruit, where you can see them form a powdery surface. When yeast consumes the sugar in fruit, it converts it into two products: carbon dioxide, which is a gas, and ethanol, which is a liquid alcohol. This is a form of fermentation. Ethanol is the alcohol in wine and other alcoholic drinks, so yeast is used to make these drinks. Wine, for example, is made from fermented grapes.
Viruses
The smallest of all known microbes are viruses. Viruses are not really organisms. They are chemical clusters that invade the cells of living things and eventually destroy them. Viruses can kill people, and they can also get into fruit crops and destroy them. Fruit viruses are often spread from one plant to another by aphids (tiny pests that feed on the plants).
