A weird-looking parasitic plant has discarded all its photosynthesis machinery – and nevertheless has found a way to thrive.

Some plants bend the rules of plant life so far that they barely resemble plants at all. Balanophora is one of them - a ...

In the damp understory of forests in Taiwan, mainland Japan, and Okinawa, a plant called Balanophora can fool you at first ...

Balanophora is a plant that abandoned photosynthesis long ago and now lives entirely as a parasite on tree roots, hidden in ...

A plant that looks like a fungus, lives like a parasite, and clones itself in the dark—Balanophora may be one of evolution’s ...

“My long-standing aim is to rethink what it truly means to be a plant,” Kenji Suetsugu, a botanist at Kobe University in Japan, said in a statement. “For many years I have been fascinated by plants ...

New species of the plants are still being discovered, and their parasitic biology is being probed for potential cancer ...

Jim Westwood, professor of plant pathology, physiology, and weed science, examines dodder, a parasitic plant with a covert weaponry system. Research at Virginia Tech and Penn State that has revealed ...

Dodder, a parasitic plant that causes major damage to crops in the US and worldwide every year, can silence the expression of genes in the host plants from which it obtains water and nutrients. This ...

Some parasitic plants steal genetic material from their host plants and use the stolen genes to more effectively siphon off the host's nutrients. A new study led by researchers at Penn State and ...

Sorghum crops in sub-Saharan Africa suffer heavy losses from the parasitic plant witchweed (Striga hermonthica). A new study shows how soil microbes can help protect sorghum from this pest and could ...

Plant parasitic nematodes, such as the well-known root-knot nematode and the cyst nematode, invade plant roots near the root tip and enter the plants vascular system where they feed on the plant for ...