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

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 ...

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

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

Present day life fully depends on photosynthetic organisms like plants and algae that capture and convert CO 2. At the heart of these processes lies an enzyme called Rubisco that captures more than ...

The basics of photosynthesis are something that every student learns in school: carbon dioxide, water and light in; oxygen ...

Photosynthesis is a chemical process by which plants, some bacteria, and algae convert energy derived from sunlight to chemical energy. This is an important process for biological life on earth ...

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. — Humans can do lots of things that plants can’t do. We can walk around, we can talk, we can hear and see and touch. But plants have one major advantage over humans: They can make ...

Cyanobacteria, or blue-green algae, on the surface of a lake. Bacteria were the first organisms to photosynthesize, creating the oxygen essential for the evolution of life on Earth. Philipp Schulze / ...

There's a big molecule, a protein, inside the leaves of most plants. It's called Rubisco, which is short for an actual chemical name that's very long and hard to remember. Amanda Cavanagh, a biologist ...