Plants could become zombies: It sounds like a weird mix of different video games, but farmers have been talking about “zombie” plants since the 1600s. At least when it comes to plants, not all zombies look like the dead. Plants become “zombies” that only live to feed their owners, so they are called the “living dead.”
Instead of making beautiful flowers, the plants start to make structures that look like leaves. Because of this, the plants lose their ability to make more plants. Plants start to look yellow and sick, and instead of flowers, they grow strange structures that look like leaves or bushy growths.
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Since 1967, we’ve known that this is because of a bacteria called Phytoplasma, which infects many types of flowering plants, including apple trees, strawberries, Vinca, aster members, coconut palms, coneflower, mulberry trees, sandalwood, sugarcane, wine grapes. Most of the time, it lives in tropical and subtropical areas.
Scientists in Germany figured out how bacteria take over plants and turn them into zombies. Infected plants may live, but they can’t make flowers. Instead, they often grow strange growths that make them look like Zombies. Bacteria can kill plants because they hurt the phloem, which is the tissue that moves sugars from the leaves.
The bacteria make a protein that has the same structure as a protein in the plant hosts that helps blossoms grow. When proteins in a plant bind with proteins from outside the plant instead of the plant’s own proteins, petals. And other flower parts don’t grow as they should.
For example, phytoplasma infection causes “witch’s broom” in apple trees. In this condition, the trees send out a lot of shoots from a single point, making them look like brooms. The phytoplasmas bacteria can stop the plant from making flowers and make it make strange leaves instead. This is called phyllody. Phyllody is only one sign of zombieism. Other signs include dwarfism and witch’s broom, which is a plant disease that causes the plant to send up many new shoots at once.
