Question

Plant viruses may have the following as a genetic material.

• A. ssRNA
• B. dsRNA or DNA
• C. dsDNA
• D. All of the above

Answer 1

The correct option is D All of the above

Plant viruses are the viruses that affect plants. Like all other viruses, plant viruses are obligate intracellular parasites that do not have the molecular machinery to replicate without a host. Plant viruses are pathogenic to higher plants. Although the genetic material for most organisms is double-stranded (ds) DNA, only a minority of plant viruses possess dsDNA genomes. Some of the plant viruses have genomes that are composed of single-stranded (ss) DNA. However, the majority of plant viruses do not use DNA at all. Instead, the genomes of nearly all plant viruses are made of RNA. Most of these genomes are composed of ssRNA that is the same (positive-sense) polarity as the messenger RNAs of the cell. Thus, option D is correct.