Fibrosis is a common and important disease. It is a pathological state due to excessive scar
formation mediated by an increase in activated fibroblasts that express alpha smooth muscle
actin and copious amounts of extracellular matrix molecules. Epigenetics is an area of
research that encompasses three main mechanisms: methylation, histone modifications to
the tails of histones and also non-coding RNAs including long and short non-coding RNAs.
These three mechanisms all seek to regulate gene expression without a change in the …