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

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

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

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

“My long-standing aim is to rethink what it truly means to be a plant,” Kenji Suetsugu, a botanist at Kobe University in Japan, said in a statement. “For many years I have been fascinated by plants ...

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 ...

We humans are a delicate bunch. We don’t have bark, boney exo-plates, or lush fur to protect us from hostile environments, so ...

A new method predicts leaf optical properties from traits, improving canopy light modeling and photosynthesis estimates in ...

This plant, called a fairy lantern, is a parasite that steals all its energy and nutrients from mycorrhizal fungi that dwell ...

An international team of researchers has, for the first time, demonstrated that by fixing a common glitch in photosynthesis, a crop's yield could be improved by around 40 percent. The landmark study ...

C4 photosynthesis represents a striking example of convergent evolution, where multiple plant lineages have independently modified an ancestral C3 pathway to enhance carbon fixation efficiency. This ...

Researchers from Kyushu University have developed a new numerical model to explain the behavior of sunlight under various weather conditions. Unlike previous methods that focused on how plants ...