Why is Japanese knotweed so highly invasive?

Research published in New Phytologist provides insights into why the invasive plant Japanese knotweed is so successful at outcompeting native plants.

Japanese knotweed (Reynoutria japonica), which is native to eastern Asia and is a highly invasive plant species across Europe and North America, is known to damage infrastructure and ecosystems. By comparing growth and reproduction traits of introduced plants with native plants, investigators discovered that introduced plants had gained the ability to reproduce faster by clonal propagation, a method of asexual reproduction that creates genetically identical copies of a plant. This could be one of the secrets of Japanese knotweed’s success, and this knowledge will help improve methods to control it.

The study’s methods will also be useful for other researchers looking to identify evolutionary responses of introduced plants to novel environments.

“Our international team included researchers from where Japanese knotweed is native (China and Japan) and introduced (Germany and USA) which enabled us to investigate plants from a large number of populations of this iconically global plant invader. This is a crucial approach to evaluate evolutionary changes, but is largely lacking for practical reasons,” said corresponding author Christina Richards, PhD, of the University of South Florida.

URL upon publication: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/nph.20452

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About the Journal
New Phytologist is an international journal publishing outstanding original research in plant science and its applications. Research falls into five sections: Physiology & Development, Environment, Interaction, Evolution, and Transformative Plant Biotechnology. Topics covered range from intracellular processes through to global environmental change. New Phytologist is owned by the New Phytologist Foundation, a non-profit organization dedicated to the promotion of plant science.

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