 So we took a murine model of chronic arsenic exposure where our mice were exposed to environmentally relevant levels of arsenic in their drinking water over five weeks. So to put it in perspective, if we talk about arsenic in the old lace, we're talking about acute very high dose exposures and we've known that arsenic is probably the perfect poison for thousands of years. However, what we're more concerned with is the low amount of arsenic that is found in drinking water as well as in food. Arsenic's the 21st most abundant element in the earth's crust and most of the contamination in drinking water is from the bedrock that wells After arsenic exposure, we first subjected the animals to an acute muscle injury, which we induced via cardiotoxin injection. We then evaluated muscle regeneration and functional recovery two weeks after injury. What we found was chronic arsenic exposure in our animal models results in a significant decrease in the ability of skeletal muscle to regenerate after an acute injury response and this was associated with a decreased functional recovery as measured by force producing capacity of the muscles. The impact of arsenic exposure was significant in the sense that it does seem to set up the muscle for an impaired healing response after an acute injury. The other thing that was interesting is we noted a very dramatic alteration in the skeletal muscle myometrics where we saw a dysfunctional extracellular matrix remodeling after injury. We obtained skeletal muscle from both control and arsenic exposed animals and we completely desellurized the muscle so that we were left with nothing but the extracellular matrix. This allowed us to have a three-dimensional construct whereby we then obtained naive human muscle stem cells and we seeded it onto the ECM constructs that were derived from control and arsenic exposed animals. What we found was the direct effect of the arsenic exposed matrix drove the stem cells towards a fibrogenic conversion and seemed to inhibit the capacity of our stem cells to form myotubes. Arsenic seems to be working through a signaling pathway called NF Kappa B. One of the striking results is that if we blocked this activation of the NF Kappa B program we saw that the arsenic exposed muscles recovered just fine so that actually points to a possible intervention in the future to help people who might be coming into surgery or might have been exposed to arsenic and need to recover muscle function. So these findings suggest that potentially individuals who display an impaired healing response after injury or surgical procedure for example this it may have been previously disregarded as in Sidious in Nature. Our findings suggest that in fact it may be contributed by environmental exposures.