A famous mistletoe auction has been cancelled this year for the first time in 160 years. The Tenbury Wells Mistletoe Festival, which celebrates the town’s connection to the sale of holly and mistletoe – and goes back more than ahundred years – has also had to be cancelled. A spokesperson for the Tenbury Wells Mistletoe […]
Striga is a devastating parasitic weed that attacks food crops in sub-Saharan Africa such as rice, sorghum and millet. It affects 40% of Africa’s arable savanna region, and is a major cause of food insecurity and poverty. Tackling the plant health problems experienced by rural susbistence farmers requires an extra level of local collaboration and […]
The Society asks all its members to approve the new IPPS Advisory Board. According to the majority of nominations, the IPPS Advisory Board should consist of four of its distinguished members: Koichi Yoneyama (Ehime University, Japan), Neelima Sinha (UC Davis, USA), Julie Scholes (The University of Sheffield, UK), and Jim Westwood (Virginia Tech, USA). In […]
The International Parasitic Plant Society asks all its member to vote a new IPPS treasurer. Three candidates, Professor Rosemary Ahom (Nigeria), Professor Ahmed Uludag (Turkey), and Prof. Renate Wesselingh (Belgium) put themselves up for election. Their profiles are available at the Society’s new polling page in the members area. Clicking here or on any of […]
A recent publication of researchers from Zhejiang University (China), University of Amsterdam (The Netherlands), Université de Toulouse (France) and Guangdong Academy of Sciences in Guangzhou (China) in the International Journal of Molecular Sciences describes the virulence mechanisms of parasitic plants and resistance mechanisms in their hosts, focusing on obligate root parasites of the Orobanchaceae. Parasitic […]
This paper published in British & Irish Botany this year (2020, 2(3): 223-239) might be of interest to IPPS members who work on the genus Orobanche or other taxonomically challenging parasitic plant genera. The paper highlights the presence of cryptic, previously overlooked taxa in the widespread and variable species O. minor. Specifically, two new varieties […]
The paper published in Taxon this year (2020, 69 (1): 5-27) might be of interest to many of the IPPS members. This is the first comprehensive survey of all parasitic plants that reviews the number of times these organisms evolved and tabulates the number of genera and species. Hopefully it will prove useful to many […]
Plant-parasitic plants are fascinating examples of plant evolution. They live in balance with other organisms in natural ecosystems, in contrast to most parasitic weeds that severely attack crops, reducing their yield and rendering agricultural lands uncultivable worldwide. The control of parasitic weeds is challenging because of the lack of control methods that are selective enough […]
Mutants that reveal the secrets of how plants attack? No, it’s not a scene from a science fiction movie, but you could be forgiven for thinking that. Instead, it’s a scene from real life: Researchers Cui et al. at Nara Institute of Science and Technology in Japan report in a new study in Science Advances […]
Working together with researchers from the University of Tübingen, the University of Tromsø, the UC Davis and the Sainsbury Laboratory in Norwich, biologists from Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg (FAU) have discovered how tomato plants identify Cuscuta spp. as a parasite. The plant has a protein in its cell walls that is identified as ‘foreign’ by Cuscuta Receptor […]