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 ...

The study reveals how Balanophora plants function despite abandoning photosynthesis and, in some species, sexual reproduction. Their plastid genomes shrank dramatically in a shared ancestor, yet the ...

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

We tend to think of plants as passive, vulnerable actors. But in their partnership with insects, it’s plants that often play ...

When the female gametes in plants become fertilized, a signal from the sperm activates cell division, leading to the formation of new plant seeds. This activation can also be deliberately triggered ...

This rare plant looks like a mushroom is actually a parasitic flowering species. Scientists reveal how Balanophora survives ...

Asexual, or vegetative, reproduction in plants is controlled by environmental conditions, but the molecular signaling pathways that control this process are poorly understood. Recent research suggests ...

Discover how plant patents protect unique varieties through asexual reproduction. Learn key characteristics, application needs, and how to ensure robust IP protection.

You might think flowers don’t have much choice about who they mate with, given they are rooted to the ground and can’t move. But when scientists from Nagoya, Japan used powerful microscopes to study ...