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, or a ...

Viroids are unique systems for the study of RNA structure, function and evolution. They are the minimal RNA replicons characterized so far their genome is ten-fold smaller than that the smallest known ...

During 1970 and 1971, I discovered that a devastating disease of potato plants is not caused by a virus, as had been assumed, but by a new type of subviral pathogen, the viroid. Viroids are so small — ...

For nearly seven decades since their discovery in 1898, viruses were the only organisms at the boundary between the living and the non-living. Their obligate host dependence, parasitism, and small ...

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, ...