Refer to the treatments listed below to answer the following questions. You isolate an infectious substance that is capable of causing disease in plants, but you do not know whether the infectious agent is a bacterium, virus, viroid, or prion. You have four methods at your disposal that you can use to analyze the substance in order to determine the nature of the infectious agent. I. treating the substance with nucleases that destroy all nucleic acids and then determining whether it is still infectious II. filtering the substance to remove all elements smaller than what can be easily seen under a light microscope III. culturing the substance by itself on nutritive medium, away from any plant cells IV. treating the sample with proteases that digest all proteins and then determining whether it is still infectious -Which treatment would you use to determine if the agent is a prion?
A) I only B) II only C) III only D) IV only E) either I or IV