Step 1: Theodor O. Diener was a plant pathologist working on the potato spindle tuber disease in the early 1970s.
Step 2: He discovered that the infectious agent responsible was not a virus but a much smaller, naked, circular single-stranded RNA molecule with no protein coat, which he named a viroid.
Step 3: This discovery introduced viroids as an entirely new class of plant pathogens, smaller and simpler than any known virus.
Step 4: Double stranded RNA, nucleosomes and heterospory are unrelated discoveries, so the correct answer is viroids.