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 ...

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 ...

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

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

For photosynthesis, one photon is all it takes. Only a single particle of light is required to spark the first steps of the biological process that converts light into chemical energy, scientists ...

Photosynthesis occurs in chloroplasts found within cells. It is the chloroplasts that contain the green pigment chlorophyll which absorbs light. The plant uses this glucose to grow as well as make ...

Humans owe a lot to photosynthesis, the process by which green plants turn water and carbon dioxide into the food we eat and the air we breathe. But this 3.5-billion-year-old biochemical process is ...