Revisiting non-coding nature of viroids

Viroids are small circular highly structured pathogens infecting a broad range of plants, caus-ing economic losses. Since their discovery in the 70s, they have been considered as non-coding pathogens. In the last few years the discovery of other RNA entities, similar in terms of size and structure, that where shown to be translated (e.g cirRNAs, precursors of miRNA, RNA sat-ellites) as well as studies showing that some viroids are located in ribosomes, have reemerged the idea that viroids may be translated. In this study we used advanced bioinformatic analy-sis, in vitro experiments and LC-MS/MS to search for small viroid peptides of the Pospiviroidae PSTVd. Our results suggest that in our experimental conditions, even though the circular form of PSTVd is found in ribosomes, no produced peptides were identified. This indicates that the presence of PSTVd in ribosomes is most probably not related to peptide pro-duction but rather to another unknown function that requires further study