Also: viroid, potato spindle tuber viroid, obelisk RNA, Oblin proteins
Viroids are infectious rings of RNA with no protein coat, far smaller than any virus, that cause diseases in plants. In 2024 researchers described obelisks, a new class of viroid-like RNA circles that had gone unnoticed in human gut and mouth microbes.
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Diener showed that the agent of potato spindle tuber disease is not an ordinary virus but a small, replicating, low-molecular-weight RNA, the first of the agents now called viroids.
As reported in: Diener (1971). Potato spindle tuber “virus”. Virology. doi:10.1016/0042-6822(71)90342-4
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Zheludev and colleagues described obelisks, apparently circular RNAs about 1,000 bases long that fold into rods and encode a new family of Oblin proteins. They catalogued 29,959 distinct obelisks, detected them in about 7% of stool and 50% of oral samples analysed, and identified the bacterium Streptococcus sanguinis as one host.
As reported in: Zheludev, Edgar, Lopez-Galiano et al. (2024). Viroid-like colonists of human microbiomes. Cell. doi:10.1016/j.cell.2024.09.033