Abstract
Viroids differ in two essential structural features from viruses. They are much smaller, and they are not encapsidated. Because of their small size, they possibly do not underlie all topical barriers inside the cell. Because of their infectivity as naked RNA one may speculate that also inside the cell they are present as dissolved molecules and not part of tight complexes. Such a simplified view would actually be in accordance with the very early experiments that led to the concept of viroids as a new class of infectious agents (see Diener, 1979). In those experiments, it was shown that viroid infectivity in a tissue homogenate was unprotected against RNase digestion, and that viruslike particles were not visible in infected tissue. Other early experiments indicated, however, that viroids are not ubiquitous but rather located in organelles, and even molecular viroid complexes have been suspected (Diener, 1971; Sänger, 1972).
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© 1987 Plenum Press, New York
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Riesner, D. (1987). Viroid Function. In: Diener, T.O. (eds) The Viroids. The Viruses. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4613-1855-2_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4613-1855-2_5
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