Viroids are so small — one fiftieth of the size of the smallest viruses — that many scientists initially doubted their existence. We now know that viroids cause many damaging diseases of crop ...

This is the first article in a series on viroids. Viruses, bacteria, and fungi; most people will have heard of these three major types of disease-causing microbes. Some will also have heard about ...

This is the second article in a series on viroids. The first, which can be read here, provided an overview of what viroids are and how they replicate. Whether you’re a carnivore, omnivore ...

Viroids are closed circles of ribonucleic acid (RNA) that replicate at a very low level using host cell enzymes, since they do not usually encode proteins. The existence of over ten thousand ...

Viroids are circular RNAs of only 250 to 400 nucleotides and are the smallest and simplest among the known infectious agents and have been believed to cause infections only in plants. The ...

There is growing evidence that small RNA's believed to play an antiviral defense role in many organisms, may be acting as doubleagents. In March 2004, an international team of scientists reported that ...

Diener called these life-forms ‘viroids’ since they resembled viruses. There was, however, one important distinction. Usually, genetic material contains a code that tells cells how to make ...

Stanford University researchers, who made the discovery, refer to the virus-like entities or viroids as "obelisks," Knewz.com has learned. According to Science.org, the obelisks have genomes that ...

Theodor Diener's 1971 discovery of viroids was hard sell. The now-retired Diener, who was working as a plant pathologist with the Agricultural Research Service in Maryland, was trying to isolate the ...

Scientists have uncovered a never-before-seen class of virus-like entities hiding in the human gut and mouth, and these "viroids" may influence the gene activity within the human microbiome ...

A team of researchers from the National Library of Medicine (NLM) and collaborating academic research institutions have developed a computational pipeline to identify and better understand viroids and ...