Evolutionary and Functional Genomics of Parasitic Plants (Cancelled)
Plant Biology Seminar Series

This event has been cancelled

Abstract:
Parasitic plants obtain water and nutrients from other plants through specialized feeding structures known as haustoria. Having evolved on at least a dozen independent occasions, parasitic plants represent about 1% of flowering plant species diversity. Parasitic plants range from facultative, where plants retain an ability to live on their own without a host, to complete host dependence and loss of photosynthetic ability with associated morphological reduction to the point of being nearly unrecognizable as a plant. In this talk, I will provide a telescopic overview of almost 40 years of research on parasitic plants, starting with the simple question “what happens to the chloroplast genome in a plant that no longer undergoes photosynthesis?” through to identifying specific genes involved in haustorial function and how parasitic plants interact with their hosts at a molecular level. Throughout, parasitic plants have been an endless source of surprising discoveries about genome evolution, the sources of novel traits, horizontal gene transfer, and the molecular basis of plant-plant parasitic interactions and control of parasitic plants. After highlighting a few of these fascinating chapters in parasitic plant research, I’ll briefly present a new chapter that is focused on the conservation and potential recovery of a species of parasitic plant, the scarlet paintbrush, that has mysteriously become very rare in the eastern United States, and the steps we have been taking to understand its decline and forge a path toward recovery.

About the Speaker:
Claude dePamphilis is a Professor of Biology and the Dorothy Foehr Huck and J. Lloyd Huck Distinguished Chair in Plant Biology and Evolutionary Genomics at Penn State University. He served as the Director of the Penn State Herbarium for more than 20 years, and the Center for Parasitic and Carnivorous Plants, which he helped establish in 2019. His interdisciplinary research integrates genomics, bioinformatics, and natural history to explore the origins and diversification of flowers, the evolution of organelle genomes, and the biology of parasitic plants. He served as the lead PI of the Floral Genome Project and is a co-leader of the Parasitic Plant Genome Project, investigating the genetic changes that underlie the origin, diversification, and functional biology of parasitic plants. dePamphilis earned his B.A. from Oberlin College and his Ph.D. in Botany from the University of Georgia. Before joining Penn State in 1998, he held positions at Vanderbilt University and conducted postdoctoral research at the University of Michigan and Indiana University. At Penn State, he has trained 18 Ph.D. students, 21 postdoctoral scholars and many undergraduate research students, and has hosted numerous visiting scientists from around the world, as well as teaching courses in Population Biology, Plant Systematics, and Bioinformatics. As of 2026, he continues major initiatives in parasitic plant biology, including a National Science Foundation-funded research on host-specific adaptation in agricultural pests extending through 2027, and the conservation biology of a native parasitic plant.

Contact

  Charlie Anderson
  cta3@psu.edu