Identification of critical autophagy-related proteins in diabetic retinopathy: A multi-dimensional computational study

•Autophagy-diabetic retinopathy interactome constructed and analyzed.•Co-expression network was built on a diabetic retinopathy (DR) clinical dataset.•Differentially expressed genes network was built and analyzed on the same dataset.•Three autophagy-related proteins were identified significant in DR development.•Random walk with restart confirmed the importance of these three proteins in DR.