A Hard-to-Detect Pathogen is Damaging Cannabis Crops Around the Country

One mistake that is commonly made with viroid is to regard them as viruses. A viroid though similar to viruses in some respect is different because it is q plant-specific pathogenic RNA. HpLVd was first publicly announced as a threat to marijuana and hemp plants in California sometime in 2019. Many are however of the thought that the viroid has been present in the production system of marijuana long before 2019. This is because since 2014 different cannabis plants have been suffering considerably from stunted growth, lack of trichomes, and lack of secondary metabolites. Much of these were chalked up to the effects of nutritional stress, heat, or effects of insects but the research on HpLVd shows it might have been the culprit.