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

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

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

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

A scientist has moved a step closer to turning sexually-reproducing plants into asexual reproducers, a finding that could have profound implications for agriculture. Farmers throughout the world spend ...

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 ...

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

Plant reproduction is highly complex and variable across the kingdom. The emergence of sexual reproduction has contributed to increase plant genetic diversity and enabled the colonisation of new ...

New research shows potatoes evolved from tomatoes through ancient plant mixing that created underground tubers.

The alien-like blooms and putrid stench of Amorphophallus titanum, better known as the corpse flower, draw big crowds and media coverage to botanical gardens each year. In 2015, for instance, more ...

When Jeroen Reneerkens stepped off the plane in Greenland, all he saw was white. The avian ecologist at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands was expecting to find snowless tundra teeming ...