Elastase treatment of tendon specifically impacts the mechanical properties of the interfascicular matrix.

"appendix supplementary materials image application 1 acknowledgements the authors would like to thank dr dharmesh patel for his assistance with data analysis dr stephen thorpe for his assistance with the statistical analysis and dr tony cheung for creating the matlab code for image analysis."

"Declaration of Competing Interest The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper."

"Funding Sources This study was funded by the BBSRC (BB/K008412/1). MG was funded by a QMUL Bonfield PhD scholarship. The funders had no role in study design, collection, analysis and interpretation of data, writing of the report; and in the decision to submit the article for publication."