Now, in eLife, Sanford Bernstein, Douglas Swank and colleagues at San Diego State University, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and Johns Hopkins University – including William Kronert as first author – report the surprising finding that a mutation in the motor portion of the myosin head that causes human hypertrophic cardiomyopathy can lead to degeneration of the flight muscles as well as the dysfunction of the heart tube in fruit flies (Kronert et al., 2018). The gene discussed is MYH14; the disease is hypertrophic cardiomyopathy.