Parasitic Weeds: Biology and Control
A special issue of Plants (ISSN 2223-7747). This special issue belongs to the section "Plant Protection and Biotic Interactions".
Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (31 December 2021) | Viewed by 34164
Special Issue Editors
Interests: weed science; parasitic plants; biological control; strigolactones; herbicides resistance
Interests: parasitic plants; invasive plants; weeds; weed control; cover crops; crops
Special Issue Information
Dear Colleagues,
Plant parasitism is a case of extreme plant-to-plant interaction whereby parasitic plants connect directly to the vasculature system of a host plant, drawing from its water, nutrients, and assimilates. During their evolution from non-parasitic origins, parasitic plants have developed many specific functions, such as host detection, host attachment, host exploitation, and host defense suppression. The world of parasitic plants includes about 20 families with a wide trophic spectrum, from facultative hemiparasites, which are able to perform photosynthesis and therefore may survive without a connection to the host, to obligatory holoparasites, which have no photosynthetic abilities. Some parasitic species are noxious weeds and damage major agricultural crops, causing heavy economical losses worldwide.
The parasitic lifestyle in plants has always been the subject of the curiosity of scientists, but during the last decade, our understanding of the parasitic plant–host interaction has greatly evolved due to rapid advances in molecular and genomic tools, such as high-throughput DNA sequencing, transcriptomics, and metabolomics. The latest findings take the science of parasitic plants to a higher level, and open up new horizons in parasitic plant management. The discovery of a novel family of phytohormones, the strigolactones, and their involvement in host detection and the evolution of parasitic plants, the discovery of the information exchange between host and parasite, and the elucidation of the parasite’s suppression of the host’s defense mechanism have led to a deeper understanding of physiological processes in host–parasite interaction. In the light of recent achievements, the re-evaluation of control management, including crop breeding and molecular genetics, is on the agenda.
This Special Issue will be focused on both research articles and reviews providing new insights into the field of parasitic plants, including topics such as parasitic plants’ biology and life cycle, the physiology of parasitism, genetics, evolution, population dynamics, host–parasite interaction, etc. Valuable articles dealing with new strategies in parasitic plant management are very welcome.
Call for student papers:
We strongly invite M.Sc. and Ph.D. students to submit papers resulting from their thesis and research, within the topic of ‘Parasitic plants- biology and control’. The outstanding student paper picked by the editors will be granted a waiver on the publication fee. Please see the instruction for authors at https://www.mdpi.com/journal/plants/instructions.
Dr. Evgenia Dor
Dr. Yaakov Goldwasser
Guest Editors
Manuscript Submission Information
Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.
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Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2700 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.
Keywords
- biological control
- host range
- parasitic plants
- parasitic plants genome
- weed management
- plant–host interaction
- plant resistance
- strigolactones
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