The production of protein hormones by human placenta, amnion, chorion, and decidua capsularis was studied in in vitro experiments to establish whether the decidua could be considered a specialized structure for the release of PRL. The tissues were incubated in the incubation medium, we found a highly significant rise of PRL during culture of the decidua, while no increase was noticed during culture of the placenta or amnion. Conversely, chorionic somatomammotropin and CG increased greatly and quickly during culture of placenta but not during culture of other tissues. No significant change was found in GH. The total PRL released into the medium from decidua was 3 times higher than the initial PRL content of this sittue; addition of puromycin to the incubation medium reduced both the tissue content and the release of PRL to almost 50% of the control values. This result raises the possibility of a specific endocrine activity of decidua capsularis. The PRL-secreint cells of the decidua probably do not possess dopamine receptors, since bromocriptine, when added to the medium, did not influence the release of PRL, confirming our previous in vivo observations.

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"Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to present the application of a novel hybrid algorithm, called. MeTEO (Metric-Topological-Evolutionary-Optimization), based on the combination of three heuristics. inspired by artificial life to the solution of optimization problems of a real electronic vacuum device.. Design\/methodology\/approach – The Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO), the Flock-of-Starlings. Optimization (FSO) and the Bacterial Chemotaxis Algorithm (BCA) were adapted to implement a novel. meta-heuristic MeTEO the FSO has been powerfully employed for exploring the whole space of. solutions, whereas the PSO is used to explore local regions where FSO had found solutions, and BCA. to refine the solutions found by PSO, thanks its better performances in local search.. Findings – The optimization of the focusing magnetic field of a Travelling Wave Tubes (TWT). collector is presented in order to show the effectiveness of MeTEO, in combination with COLLGUN FE. simulator and equivalent source representation. The optimization of the focusing magnetic structure is. obtained by using a maximum of 100 steps for each heuristic.. Practical implications – The paper describes the development of a novel efficient parallel method. for the solution of electromagnetic device optimization problems.. Originality\/value – The paper shows the capabilities of a novel combination of optimization methods. inspired by “artificial life” which allows us to achieve effective solutions of multimodal optimization. problems, typical of the electromagnetic device optimization, with an acceptable computational cost,. thanks also to its natural parallel implementation.