The ability of plants to fulfill nutritional needs by parasitizing neighboring plants has originated several times in angiosperm evolution. Molecular tools are now being exploited to investigate the evolutionary origins of plant parasitism and to dissect the genetic mechanisms governing parasitic plant-host plant interactions. Investigating the nature of signal exchanges between parasitic plant...

The multiple independent origins of plant parasitism suggest that numerous ancestral plant lineages possessed the developmental flexibility to meet the requirements of a parasitic life style, including such adaptations as the ability to recognize host plants, form an invasive haustorium, and regulate the transfer of nutrients and other molecules between two different plants. In this review, we ...

Isoprene is the most abundant volatile compound emitted by vegetation. It influences air chemistry and is part of plant defense against abiotic stresses. However, whether isoprene influences biotic interactions between plants and other organisms has not been investigated to date. Here we show a new effect of isoprene, namely its influence on interactions between plants and insects. Herbivory in...

Numerous pathogenic or parasitic organisms attack plant roots to obtain nutrients, and the apoplast including the plant cell wall is where the plant cell meets such organisms. Root parasitic angiosperms and nematodes are two distinct types of plant root parasites but share some common features in their strategies for breaking into plant roots. Striga and Orobanche are obligate root parasitic an...

Dodders are among the most important parasitic plants that cause serious yield losses in crop plants. In this report, we sought to unveil the genetic basis of dodder parasitism by profiling the trancriptomes of Cuscuta pentagona and C. suaveolens, two of the most common dodder species using a next-generation RNA sequencing platform. De novo assembly of the sequence reads resulted in more than 4...