Researchers have discovered mysterious new microbes that colonize the microscopic world inside our mouths and digestive tracts.
These obelisks, as they've been named, are minuscule bits of ribonucleic acid (RNA) that serve an unknown function, even though their presence could be widespread in the microbiome, according to a recent study published recently in Cell.
Obelisks and Viroids
It’s unclear exactly what obelisks are — even the researchers who discovered them still know very little. Ivan Zheludev, a biochemist at Stanford University and the first author of the paper, and his colleagues, classify these obelisks as viroid-like RNAs. Viroids themselves are only found in plants, so far.
“Viroids are a group of noncoding sub viral RNAs that infect plant hosts,” wrote the authors of a study published in PLOS Pathogens.
