Sections within Figures 2 and 6 appear similar to each other. Also, Figure 1B appears similar with a panel from Figure 1k of the article published by Lin Xiao, Dongping Gong, Loufeng Liang, Anwei Liang, Huaxin Liang, Xiayi Xu and Hongli Teng in Clinical Epigenetics 13 (2021) 53 https://doi. org/10.1186/s13148-021-01005-9, while Figure 4B appears similar with a panel from Figure 2A of the article published by Hongwei Chen, Shengdi Yang and Ruyi Shao in Arthritis Research & Therapy 21 (2019) 271 https://doi. org/10.1186/s13075-019-2033-5. Although this article was published earlier than the other articles, the Editor decided to retract this article given concerns about the reliability of the data.

Following the release of the concerns in the public domain, the authors contacted the journal to report that some of the experiments in this article were executed in the laboratory of a third-party company. The authors reportedly found that the results of these experiments were unreliable in later validation experiments. The authors would like to apologize for the inconvenience caused.