One of the most widespread and devastating plant diseases is rice blast which causes significant crop losses throughout China, South East Asia, and South America,representing a loss of 157 million tons of rice per annum in the staple food crop of one half of the worlds population.Major epidemics covering vast areas occur on a regular basis causing severe food shortages to entire nations and leading to multiple social crises.The pathogenic fungus, Magnaporthe oryzae, has emerged as a model system for dissecting fungal-plant interactions.Considerable progress has been made in identifying gene functions necessary for the regulation of pre-and post-penetration events in the development and pathogenicity of the fungus such as the appressorium (an infection structure) formation and invasive growth of the pathogen.However, the detailed molecular mechanisms of these developmental stages, especially appressorium morphogenesis, are still relatively poorly understood.Currently, we isolated about 9 autophagic genes, which are highly conserved among other eukaryotes, including humans and plants.Disruption of these genes influenced the capability of surviving starvation, conidiation, conidial germination, lipid turnover, and appressorium turgor generation.As a result, these null mutants lose its penetration and pathogenicity into the host plants.By reintroducing the autophagic genes to their null mutants, all the defects were restored.Taken together, clarification of the functions and network of these autophagy genes will lead to well understanding of the role of autophagic genes in this fungal pathogenesis.