Abstract
Wizard’s net, devil’s guts, and witch’s hair are just a few of the common names for dodder, a nefarious rootless and leafless parasitic plant that sucks the water and nutrients out of its plant victims using a penetrating organ called a haustorium. Masses of the spaghetti-like dodder can smother crops, including soybeans, clover, and alfalfa. New research suggests that dodder’s victims try to make the best of a miserable situation. Because dodder’s haustoria bridge the vasculatures of multiple plants, the victims can use the parasite as a conduit to share chemical information about herbivorous insect pests when they try to invade, reports a team led by Ian T. Baldwin of the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology and Jianqiang Wu of the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Kunming Institute of Botany (Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 2017, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1704536114). Working with two soybean plants connected by dodder, the team found that
Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
