Theodor Diener had a problem. It was 1967, and he and a colleague had successfully isolated the infectious agent causing potato spindle tuber disease, which devastates crops. But it wasn’t like ...

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 ...

Hop latent viroid (HLVd) has emerged as a major challenge for cannabis cultivation and plant pathology research. A member of the viroid family, HLVd is one of the smallest known infectious agents, ...

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 ...

Viroids are the smallest known plant pathogens, comprising single-stranded, circular RNAs of a few hundred nucleotides and lacking any protein-coding capacity. They are classified into two families ...