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

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

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

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

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

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

Parasitic weeds extract water and nutrients from their host plants. But what makes these parasites so successful? A study led by Prof Susann Wicke from the Institute for Evolution and Biodiversity at ...

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

Not all leafy plants are green. Some of them get all their nutrients by stealing them from other species, and lack chlorophyll. Many of these parasitic plants make their connection with the hosts ...

A dodder plant begins its life looking like a tapeworm. The tiny plant, which will never grow leaves or roots, elongates in a spindly spiral. Round and round it swirls, searching for a host plant.

For most of their lives, plants in the Sapria genus are barely anything — thin ribbons of parasitic cells winding inside vines in Southeast Asian rainforests. They become visible only when they ...

In Old Norse mythology, Baldr, the son of the god Odin and the goddess Frigg, was slain with a mistletoe spear. Some ...