Cuscuta is the only parasitic genus in Convolvulaceae family. This genus is globally distributed, with most species in the tropics, subtropics, and some in the temperate regions. In this study, the micro-morphological features and molecular evidencesof 12 populations from three species of Cuscuta (C. australis, C. campestris,and C. chinensis) have been considered. In total, seven quantitative a...

Species interactions are well known to affect species diversity in communities, but the effects of parasites have been less studied. Previous studies on parasitic plants have found both positive and negative effects on plant community diversity. Cuscuta howelliana is an abundant endemic parasitic plant that inhabits California vernal pools. We tested the hypothesis that C. howelliana acts as a ...

A toxic effect of alpha,alpha-trehalose in an angiospermic plant, Cuscuta reflexa (dodder), is described. This disaccharide and its analogs, 2-aminotrehalose and 4-aminotrehalose, induced a rapid blackening of the terminal region of the vine which is involved in elongation growth. From the results of in vitro growth of several angiospermic plants and determination of trehalase activity in them,...

There is a currently worldwide upsurge in the use of herbal preparations and active ingredients of medicinal plant in health care. This is particularly true in the rural areas of Asian countries where herbal medicines are the only choice for treating human ailments. Present study reveals the difference in the antimicrobial activity pattern extracts of Cuscuta reflexa and Abutilon indicum in eth...

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...

Horizontal attenuation total reflection Fourier transformation infrared spectroscopy (HATR-FT-IR) studies on cuscutae semen and its confusable varieties Japanese dodder and sinapis semen combined with discrete wavelet transformation (DWT) and radial basis function (RBF) neural networks have been conducted in order to classify them. DWT is used to decompose the FT-IRs of cuscutae semen, Japanese...