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

There are plants which, like the vampires of Halloween legend, suck the “blood” of other plants. Parasitic plants take nutrients and water from other plants by extracting them from their host through ...

Using the model Orobanchaceae parasitic plant Phtheirospermum japonicum, scientists from Nagoya University and other research institutes from Japan have discerned the molecular mechanisms underlying ...

Dodder vines on a tomato plant. The white flowers are dodder. New research shows that chemical signals from the host, called RNA, plant pass deep into the parasite. A parasitic plant that sucks water ...

Plant-parasitic nematodes (PPN) are significant pests that threaten the production of economically important crops, thereby ...

Understanding the communications weaponry system of dodder, which operates much like a computer virus, could provide researchers with a method to engineer parasite-resistant plants. Dodder, a ...

Great fleas have little fleas upon their backs to bite ‘em, And little fleas have lesser fleas, and so ad infinitum. John Nelson is the retired curator of the A.C. Moore Herbarium at the University of ...

Around 1% of flowering plants are parasites. Some of these parasites can survive without host plants while others cannot. The former are called facultative parasites and the latter obligate parasites.

Some parasitic plants steal genetic material from their host plants and use the stolen genes to more effectively siphon off the host's nutrients. A new study led by researchers at Penn State and ...