Theodor O. Diener

Theodor O. Diener is an American plant pathologist and was the first in the field to describe viroids. In 1971 he showed that the causative agent of Potato spindle tuber disease was the potato spindle tuber viroid (PSTV). PSTV is a 130,000 dalton RNA virus that has no coat protein, at the time of his discovery biological molecules this size that had no proteins, were not known to be biologically active.

References

• USDA-ARS. 1989. Tracking the Elusive Viroid