If you happen to come across plants of the Balanophoraceae family in a corner of a forest, you might easily mistake them for fungi growing around tree roots. Their mushroom-like structures are ...

And yet there are a handful of plants on Long Island that aren’t green and don’t make their own food by using sunlight and carbon dioxide. These fascinating group of plants are known as parasitic ...

Researchers have discovered how parasitic plants evolved the ability to detect and attack their hosts. Their findings could lead to new techniques to control the thieving weeds. An international team ...

In the damp understory of forests in Taiwan, mainland Japan, and Okinawa, a plant called Balanophora can fool you at first glance. Its knobby flower stalks look more like a mushroom than a flowering ...

Two parasitic plants in a new study are losing genes related to photosynthesis and other plant functions as they continue their food-sucking habits. By Laura Baisas Published Sep 21, 2023 11:00 AM EDT ...

Targeting a newly discovered vulnerability in the signals that cyst nematodes use to infect plant roots could be a powerful method for reducing the damage the parasitic worms cause in crops such as ...

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 ...

In recent years, we’ve learned more and more about the ways plants communicate — Quanta Magazine‘s story “The Secret Language of Plants” is a good starting point — and new research from a Virginia ...

Unfortunately, this book can't be printed from the OpenBook. If you need to print pages from this book, we recommend downloading it as a PDF. Visit NAP.edu/10766 to get more information about this ...

If you like to eat a variety of foods and if you like to wear cotton, you ought to be concerned about plant-parasitic nematodes. Plant-parasitic nematodes are microscopic worms that extract water and ...