This is research on the New Orleans Brass Band tradition. How popular music has influenced the bands repertoire and the style of music has been transferred to other areas of the country resulting in the formation of hybrid bands. Madison, Wisconsin is an area with two popular brass bands that began by studying the New Orleans brass bands' culture and music. Those bands are Mama Digdown's Brass Band and Youngblood Brass Band. Mama Digdown's is a brass band that performs original music in the traditional styles and forms of New Orleans brass band. Youngblood Brass Band started because Mama Digdown's inspired them and began playing shows with Digdown's and eventually broke away to form their own band. They wanted to push the limits of the New Orleans brass band instrumentation by incorporating hip-hop, rap, jazz, 1980's pop music, rock, and heavy metal that is rolled up into an intense brass sound.

Huntington disease (HD) is a fatal neurodegenerative disease caused by CAG tract expansion in the huntingtin (HTT) gene, which results in production of mutant huntingtin (mtHTT) protein. Although mtHTT is expressed throughout life, onset of HD symptoms typically begins in mid-life, around 35 to 50 years of age. Characteristic HD symptoms include motor, cognitive, and psychiatric abnormalities. The emergence of symptoms in adulthood suggests that aging may play a role in HD pathogenesis. Furthermore, markers of accelerated aging can be observed in HD patients, including telomere attrition, epigenetic alterations, and mitochondrial dysfunction. Our lab has previously observed that induction of age-like changes by treatment with progerin, the mutant protein that causes Hutchinson-Gilford Progeria Syndrome, enhances HD phenotypes and contributes to pathogenesis in HD neurons. Taken together, these findings suggest a link between aging and HD, with implications for potential therapeutic benefits from anti-aging treatment. Our lab has conducted a young blood anti-aging trial in which aged HD and wild-type (WT) mice were injected with plasma from young WT or HD mice. Previous work in our lab confirmed that cortical aging markers decline with age at the protein level and are differentially affected by young blood treatment. In this study, we observed a significant effect of age on striatal expression of aging markers, Grin1 and Lmnb1. Varying effects of young blood anti-aging treatment were observed on the genes of interest.