WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. - A study out of Harvard and Purdue universities is starting to unravel the genetic mechanisms that allow some plants to duplicate their entire genomes and continue to reproduce.

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 ...

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 ...

Sinking your teeth into a juicy, ripe watermelon is one of summer's greatest pleasures, particularly when you don't have to spit out any seeds. Indeed, humans have adapted many fruits to be seedless ...

Humans like plants. We like seeing them change the colour of their leaves throughout the year. They connect us to nature even if we live in a big ...

Researchers have used a unique microscopic technique to examine the dynamics of pollen tubes in the Arabidopsis plant. They were able to observe the mechanism of one-to-one pollen tube guidance, a ...

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 ...

Take it from a seasoned hortifreak, plants can reproduce in weird ways. I’m not talking about unusual seeds, ranging from giant naked coconuts to those little bumps on the outside of strawberry fruit ...