Ding and colleagues introduced mutations to specific points within the viroid RNA to see how such disruption affected the role of each piece of the structure.

Viroids are the world's smallest infectious pathogen. Unlike viruses, they do not carry any proteins of their own. Despite this, they can still cause serious disease in plants. How?

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 ...

ROBINSON 2004 FIGURE 4. The viroid is a single-stranded piece of circular RNA that has an unusual structure due to ... More complementary base pairing.