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 ...

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 ...

Potato spindle tuber viroid (PSTVd) has a circular non-coding RNA genome of 359 nucleotides that replicates and spreads systemically in host plants. Consequently, all functions needed to establish a ...

The cause of a potato disease bedeviled scientists for decades before Dr. Diener figured out that an impossibly small pathogen called a viroid was to blame. By Daniel E. Slotnik Finding something ...

Bare-naked Viroids 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 ...