Recently, novel arenaviruses were found in snakes with boid inclusion body disease (BIBD); these form the new genus Reptarenavirus within the family Arenaviridae. We used next-generation sequencing and de novo sequence assembly to investigate reptarenavirus isolates from our previous study. Four of the six isolates and all of the samples from snakes with BIBD contained at least two reptarenavir...

The generation of balanced incomplete block designs (BIBD) is a hard constrained combinatorial problem whose applications are manifold. Although the BIBD problem can be easily formulated as a combinatorial optimization problem, its resolution still constitutes a formidable challenge for solving techniques. In this work we devise a memetic algorithm (MA) for tackling the BIBD problem. This MA fe...

A directed BIBD with parameters (v,b,r,k,λ*) is a BIBD with parameters (v, b, r, k, 2λ*) in which each ordered pair of varieties occurs together in exactly λ* blocks. It is shown that λ*v(v 1) = 0 (mod 3) is a necessary and sufficient condition for the existence of a directed (v, b, r, k, λ*) BIBD with k = 3. Disciplines Physical Sciences and Mathematics Publication Details Seberry, J and Skill...

Boid inclusion body disease (BIBD) is a fatal disorder of boid snakes that is suspected to be caused by a retrovirus. In order to identify this agent, leukocyte cultures (established from Python molurus specimens with symptoms of BIBD or kept together with such diseased animals) were assessed for reverse transcriptase (RT) activity. Virus from cultures exhibiting high RT activity was banded on ...

Boid inclusion body disease (BIBD) is an often fatal disease affecting mainly constrictor snakes. BIBD has been associated with infection, and more recently with coinfection, by various reptarenavirus species (family Arenaviridae). Thus far BIBD has only been reported in captive snakes, and neither the incubation period nor the route of transmission are known. Herein we provide strong evidence ...

Key distribution is an important problem in wireless sensor networks where sensor nodes are randomly scattered in adversarial environments. Due to the random deployment of sensors, a list of keys must be pre-distributed to each sensor node before deployment. To establish a secure communication, two nodes must share common key from their key-rings. Otherwise, they can find a keypath in which ens...

We prove three theorems giving extremal bounds on the incidence structures determined by subsets of the points and blocks of a balanced incomplete block design (BIBD). These results generalize and strengthen known bounds on the number of incidences between points and m-flats in affine geometries over finite fields. First, we show an upper bound on the number of incidences between sufficiently l...

Large number of watermarks is crucial for some real watermarking applications, such as transaction tracking. The purpose of this paper is to enlarge the set of structured watermarks based on balanced incomplete block designs (BIBD). An approach is proposed to generate new structured watermarks by combining existing BIBD-based watermarks. The corresponding recognition rules for the new set of wa...

Super-simple designs are useful in constructing codes and designs such as superimposed codes and perfect hash families. Recently, Gronau et al determined the existence of super-simple (v, 5, 2)-BIBDs with possible exceptions of v ∈ {75, 95, 115, 135, 195, 215, 231, 285, 365, 385, 515}. In this article, we investigate the existence of a super-simple (v, 5, 4)-BIBD and show that such a design exi...