Category: Science Publisher: ARS
ISBN-10: B00071UTOE
Pages: 100
The story of the discovery of the first known viroid, a bit of naked RNA that can cause plant diseases and is similar in some ways to prions in animals.
Excerpt
A virus is difficult to imagine. It doesn't grow by cell division as do living things. It has no metabolism. It can't move by itself. But because of the deadly diseases viruses can cause, scientists suspected their existence more than 50 years before they actually found one. ...
... But, unlike finding the long-sought virus, discovery of the even simpler viroid was not supposed to happen.
Our human genome is full of viruses similar to HIV-1. These have played an important role in human evolution and still play an important role in human embryology and day-to-day chemistry. Just how important are they to our evolution past and future?
