ATG7 and Alzheimer disease: As hippocampus is closely associated with learning and memory and is affected in AD18, we next analyzed the abnormal expressed autophagy-related genes in hippocampus using the AD dataset (GSE5281) and found that the expression of ATG3, ATG5, ATG7, ATG9A, and ATG16L1 were downregulated in hippocampus in patients with AD (Fig. 5a–e).