Brachypodium distachyon has relative small plant size,and short life cycle and is easy to cultivate.Additionally,it has other advantages such as self fertilization,high grain yield and efficient transformation system.Especially,it has the smallest genomes of reported grasses and is close relative of wheat in phylogenetic tree.Because of these advantages or characteristics,B.distachyon is one desirable model system for research work.In recent years,many important advances were made in cytogenetic,genomics,comparative genomics,functional genomics,plant-pathogen interactions and other fields.These advances include the completion of the whole genome sequencing,the improved and optimized transformation system and the construction of the T-DNA insertion mutant library,etc.This review mainly summarized the latest progresses in this field and made a prospect to the future.