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

A weird-looking parasitic plant has discarded all its photosynthesis machinery – and nevertheless has found a way to thrive.

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

C4 photosynthesis represents a striking example of convergent evolution, where multiple plant lineages have independently modified an ancestral C3 pathway to enhance carbon fixation efficiency. This ...

Researchers at the University of Liège (ULiège) have identified microstructures in fossil cells that are 1.75 billion years old. These structures, called thylakoid membranes, are the oldest ever ...

A new study sheds new light on the evolution of photosynthesis in plants and algae, which could help to improve crop production. A Rutgers-led study sheds new light on the evolution of photosynthesis ...

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 ...

When early microbes evolved, some species developed ways to convert sunlight into cellular energy and to use that energy to capture carbon from the atmosphere. The origin of this process, known as ...

Selective pressure exerted by a massive decline in atmospheric CO₂ levels 55 to 40 million years ago promoted the evolution of a novel, highly efficient mode of photosynthetic carbon assimilation ...

American Journal of Botany, Vol. 88, No. 7 (Jul., 2001), pp. 1189-1198 (10 pages) Diversity in photosynthetic pathways in the angiosperm family Chenopodiaceae is expressed in both biochemical and ...

Photosynthesis transforms solar energy into oxygen and sugar and first arose in bacteria, but the molecular mechanisms involved in the origin and evolution of the existing bacterial phototrophs have ...