is the most important pathogen of potatoes which causes post-harvest destructive losses and deteriorates the market value of potato tubers worldwide. Here, was used as a host pathogen model system and it was revealed that autophagy plays a vital role as a regulator in the morphology, cellular growth, development, as well as the pathogenicity of . Previous studies based upon identification of the gene responsible for encoding the autophagy pathway components from have shown putative orthologs of 16 core autophagy related- genes of yeast in the genome database which were autophagy-related and comprised of ubiquitin-like protein . This study elucidates the molecular mechanism of the autophagy-related gene in . A deletion (∆) mutants of (∆) was generated to evaluate nuclear dynamics. As compared to wild type and overexpression (OE) strains, strains failed to show positive MDC (monodansylcadaverine) staining which revealed that is compulsory for autophagy in . A significant reduction in conidiation and hyphal growth was shown by the ∆ strains resulting in loss of virulence on potato tubers. The hyphae of mutants contained two or more nuclei within one hyphal compartment while wild type hyphae were composed of uninucleate hyphal compartments. Our findings reveal that the vital significance of as a key target in controlling the dry rot disease in root crops and potato tubers at the postharvest stage has immense potential of disease control and yield enhancement.