Paperless Choral Classroom

The idea of the Worcester City Music Project developed when the Worcester Arts Council received a grant to create a paperless database system. The end goal of the project is for Worcester Organizations to be able to share their music with one another through an online database. Each site would have a username and password to this database allowing the music to be shared with no cost to any organization. Our group focused on the organization of music, the online record of each piece into the database, and site visits to inform organizations of the project and hope for their participation. Although there are still areas of concern when it comes to the online sharing methods, the results from our project were used to develop recommendations for future teams to enhance the music grant

Optimization of spheroid formation: the case of Mn9D cells as a novel tool to assess cytotoxicity and neurodegeneration

It is difficult to predict the toxic effects of pesticides on humans because traditional 2D cell culture does not provide physiologically relevant data. As a result, we designed a process utilizing 3D cell culture as a model to study the cytotoxicity caused by pesticide exposure. Mn9D cells are well-established as a model of studying neurodegeneration and have not been published in 3D cell culture. Thus, we developed a new approach to form 3D spheroids, with Mn9D cells to model the cellular interactions of neurons. We tested various cell suspension platforms and spheroid characteristics to determine the optimal spheroid. We found that PDMS-coated 96 well plates with 5,000 cells per well formed spheroids with the highest degree of compactness, with an average sphericity of .958 ± .030