Drought affects the growth and development of plants at every phase and various physiological metabolic processes in plants,and ecological environment. It is one of the most disastrous limiting factors for growth and survival of plants. With the development of molecular biology,studying the regulation mechanisms of stress resistances at molecular scale has been become the key task in agricultural research. This paper describes the advances in drought resistance of plants in recent years based on two aspects:the identification and evaluation system of drought resistance in plant,and the mechanism of drought resistance,which aims at providing reference and strategies for plant drought resistance molecular mechanism research and molecular genetic breeding in plant drought resistance improvement.