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 ...

Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. Illustration of pink cells lining the human gut. Scientists have uncovered a never-before-seen class of virus-like entities hiding ...

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 ...

A team of researchers has developed a computational pipeline to identify and better understand viroids and viroid-like covalently closed circular RNAs (cccRNAs, also referred to as, simply, circular ...

Our mouths and guts are teeming with mysterious somethings that are unknown to science, new research suggests. A team says they’ve discovered distinct virus-like structures hanging out among the ...

An uber-primitive plant pathogen made from naked strands of genetic material mutates faster than any other known organism — and it might just illuminate the origins of life. Called hammerhead viroids, ...

Theodor O. Diener, a Swiss-born scientist whose investigation more than half a century ago of shriveled, stunted potatoes yielded the discovery of the tiniest known agent of infectious disease, a ...

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 — ...