Abstract
A virus-specific small nucleic acid (strong-stop DNA) was identified in rice plants infected with rice tungro bacilliform virus, but not in the virus particles. This nucleic acid was shown to consist of about 595 deoxyribonucleotides with about 70 ribonucleotides covalently linked at the 5' end. Hybridization with sequence-specific oligonucleotides showed that the ribonucleotides were from the plant cytoplasmic tRNAMeti sequence. PCR analysis detected hairpin structures at the 3' end of the DNA.