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

“My long-standing aim is to rethink what it truly means to be a plant,” Kenji Suetsugu, a botanist at Kobe University in ...

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

Balanophora plants represent an extreme example of this shift. They do not produce their own food through photosynthesis but ...

Balanophora lost photosynthesis long ago but kept tiny plastids that run key chemistry and shows how forest parasites adapt ...

Parasitic plants are notorious agricultural pests that drain nutrients from crops and cause economic losses of more than USD ...

Balanophora shed one third of its genes as it evolved into a very streamlined parasitic plant. Balanophora is a parasitic plant found in tropical and temperate regions in Asia and tropical Africa and ...

While most plants form a symbiotic partnership with mycorrhizal fungi, the fairy lantern is a mycohetertroph which manages to ...

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