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

Balanophora may look like a mushroom, but instead of being a fungus, it's a parasitic plant with rare traits that puzzle ...

The rest of this article is behind a paywall. Please sign in or subscribe to access the full content. A parasitic bacterium has found a way to turn its host plant sterile, forcing it to grow leaves ...

Some parasitic plants can ‘steal’ genetic information from their hosts through horizontal gene transfer, which they then use to make themselves a better parasite. Horizontal gene transfer (HGT) is a ...

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

Using the model Orobanchaceae parasitic plant Phtheirospermum japonicum, scientists from Nagoya University and other research institutes from Japan have discerned the molecular mechanisms underlying ...

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 ...

There are plants which, like the vampires of Halloween legend, suck the “blood” of other plants. Parasitic plants take nutrients and water from other plants by extracting them from their host through ...

Parasites are the ultimate moochers, earning a living by stealing hard-earned nutrients from their hosts. Now, a new study in plants suggests that parasites sometimes give something back: foreign ...