To cause rice blast disease, the fungus Magnaporthe oryzae elaborates 
specialized infection structures called appressoria, which use enormous turgor 
to rupture the tough outer cuticle of a rice leaf. Here, we report the 
generation of a set of 22 isogenic M. oryzae mutants each differing by a single 
component of the predicted autophagic machinery of the fungus. Analysis of this 
set of targeted deletion mutants demonstrated that loss of any of the 16 genes 
necessary for nonselective macroautophagy renders the fungus unable to cause 
rice blast disease, due to impairment of both conidial programmed cell death and 
appressorium maturation. In contrast, genes necessary only for selective forms 
of autophagy, such as pexophagy and mitophagy, are dispensable for 
appressorium-mediated plant infection. A genome-wide analysis therefore 
demonstrates the importance of infection-associated, nonselective autophagy for 
the establishment of rice blast disease.