Abstract: With the quick development of economy and the level of people’ living condition, functional foods have become gradually embraced by consumers and have a great growth potential. Rice is the main staple food in China, it plays an important role in people’s health promotion and public nutrition improvement, and here is an ever-increasing consumer demand for the functional quality of rice. This review introduces the concept of functional rice and summarizes the current research progress on this topic and the application of breeding strategies including traditional breeding, induced mutation, molecular marker assisted selection and transgenic engineering in the research of a new generation of functional rice that posses health benefits，therapeutic values, bioreactor properties, and other unique functions. In the last, we point out the prospect of the functional rice from the social development, germplasm innovation, the breeding of functional rice by biological technology and the test of active material related functional rice. We conclude that developing and marketing of functional rice is becoming a hot research focus in the near future.

Key words: Functional rice, Functional rice breeding, Research progress