Abstract: Gene cloning is a prerequisite for its functional identification. Along with the release of genomic sequences of many plants such as Arabidopsis thaliana， Populus trichocarpa， Oryza sativa， it is an inevitable trend of molecular biology with the transition from genome to postgenomics， also it will provide powerful support of genomic data for the cloning of major gene related to some important agricultural characteristics. At present， there are some traditional and derived techniques of gene cloning. In this paper， five methods， such as positional cloning，homologous sequence， transposon tagging， expressed sequence tagging， differentially expressed gene cloning were briefly reviewed in order to provide a useful reference for researchers working in this area.

Key words: plant, functional gene, cloning