NEET BIOLOGY

Detailed explanation-1: -T O Diener discovered that the potato spindle tuber disease was caused not by a virus but by infectious RNA, which he termed as Viroids.

Detailed explanation-2: -Complete answer: Theodor Otto Diener discovered a capsid free infection DNA, which is the causative agent of the potato spindle tuber disease. It was not a virus, but a completely unique agent, which consists solely of a brief strand of single-stranded RNA without a protein capsid.

Detailed explanation-3: -Diener, a plant pathologist, discovered that the disease-causing microorganism in potatoes was a subviral agent that lacks one of the essential components to be a virus known as viroid.

Detailed explanation-4: -Potato spindle tuber and at least 15 other crop diseases are caused by viroids, an entity that nobody had ever heard of before 1971, its official date of discovery. Theodor O. Diener, the Agricultural Research Service plant pathologist who discovered the pathogen, named it the “viroid, ” because it is “like a virus.”

Detailed explanation-5: -Theodor O. Diener was credited with the discovery of the first viroid, Potato spindle tuber viroid (PSTVd), in 1971. This viroid is the causal agent of potato spindle tuber disease first described in the 1920s.