A Rare Parasitic Plant Lives Underground Without Photosynthesis and Reproduces Asexually

Some plants bend the rules of plant life so far that they barely resemble plants at all. Balanophora is one of them — a parasite that lives underground, lacks chlorophyll, and in some cases reproduces without sex, yet still manages to grow flowers with some of the smallest seeds known in the plant kingdom.

Found in humid regions of Japan, Taiwan, and Okinawa, Balanophora lives by parasitizing the roots of specific host trees, relying entirely on other plants for energy. A new genetic study, published in New Phytologist, shows how this lifestyle reshaped the plant at a cellular level — revealing how a non-green, sometimes entirely asexual plant can survive while defying expectations of what plants require to live.

Why Balanophora Has Been Difficult to Study

Balanophora doesn’t spend its life reaching for sunlight like most plants. Instead, it remains mostly underground in the shaded undergrowth of forests, emerging above the soil only briefly to flower. That hidden lifestyle has long intrigued botanists.

Its ecology has also made it difficult to study. The plant is rare, often confined to steep terrain, and tightly linked to a small number of host tree species. As a result, earlier research tended to focus on individual traits — such as genetics or reproduction — rather than examining how those traits evolved together.

In the new study, researchers took a broader approach. By combining field surveys with genetic and evolutionary analyses across multiple species, the team traced how Balanophora’s parasitic lifestyle, cellular biology, and reproductive strategies evolved together.

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Retaining Plastids After Losing Photosynthesis

An especially interesting find came from inside the plant’s cells. In most plants, plastids — the organelles that include chloroplasts — play a central role in photosynthesis. When plants abandon photosynthesis, those organelles typically lose genes and functionality.

In Balanophora, the plastid genome has been reduced to one of the smallest known in land plants — roughly 20 genes, compared with nearly 200 in photosynthetic species. Yet the plastid itself has not disappeared.

“It is exciting to see how far a plant can reduce its plastid genome, which at first glance looks as though the plastid is on the verge of disappearing. But looking more closely we found that many proteins are still transported to the plastid, showing that even though the plant has abandoned photosynthesis, the plastid is still a vital part of the plant’s metabolism,” said Dr. Kenji Suetsugu, a botanist at Kobe University and a coauthor of the study, in a press release.

Genetic analyses suggest that hundreds of proteins continue to be routed into the organelle, where it supports essential metabolic processes unrelated to capturing sunlight. Rather than functioning as a photosynthetic engine, the plastid appears to have been pared down and repurposed — retaining only the machinery needed to sustain life underground.

Balanophora’s Reproduction

The study also revealed variation in how the plant reproduces. Some populations rely on sexual reproduction, while others produce seeds without fertilization through a process known as apomixis — a strategy among flowering plants.

By reconstructing the plant’s evolutionary history, researchers found that fully asexual reproduction evolved multiple times, particularly in island populations. In isolated environments where mates or pollinators may be scarce, the ability to reproduce alone could offer a temporary advantage, allowing populations to persist despite their narrow ecological requirements.

The results place Balanophora among the oldest fully parasitic plant lineages and show how it has survived despite losing traits once thought essential.

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Article Sources

Our writers at Discovermagazine.com use peer-reviewed studies and high-quality sources for our articles, and our editors review for scientific accuracy and editorial standards. Review the sources used below for this article:

• This article references information from a new study that was published in New Phytologist: Phylogenomics clarifies Balanophora evolution, metabolic retention in reduced plastids, and the origins of obligate agamospermy
• This article references information from the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology: The evolutionary mysteries of a rare parasitic plant