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Numerous crosstalk interactions between RNA-binding proteins (RBPs) and microRNAs (miRNAs) have been recently reported, unveiling the complexity and importance of gene expression modulation in health and disease. They control physiological processes such as stem cell maintenance, neuronal development or energetic metabolism, but are also responsible for pathological conditions, such as muscle waste and dystrophies, atherosclerosis, obesity and cancer. MiRNAs and RBPs are two of the well-studied post-transcriptional regulators and they may even reciprocally regulate themselves. MiRNAs can act on RBPs expression while RBPs modulate miRNA biogenesis, function and degradation. RBPs and miRNAs modulate mRNA expression at different levels, affecting their stability, splicing and translation efficiency through either competition for overlapping binding or modulation of mRNA structure by binding, but several other forms of interaction have been described. In this review, we will address the current bibliography regarding miRNA:RBP interactions and crosstalk events as well as their implications in health and disease.

An arrayed waveguide grating (AWG) router is optimised for use in an AWG-based optical add-drop multiplexer (OADM) of a WDM transparent optical network with 10 Gbit/s per channel and channel spacing of 25 GHz. Two different techniques to flatten the AWG frequency response are investigated. It is shown, by simulation, that the optimised AWG router of an OADM with fold-back configuration should have bandwidth similar to the channel spacing, good isolation to adjacent channels and low or moderate additional losses. Numerical results reveal that AWG routers with frequency response between the flat and conventional AWG responses are the best candidates.