Adversity stress seriously affect growth and development of plant,even reduce crop yields.In most transgenic engineering,constitutive promoters are being used to drive the expression of exogenous genes.Recent years,constitutive promoters have been identified to improve the resistance of transgenic plants to abiotic stress,but over-expression of exogenous genes driven by constitutive promoters could cause growth stunted and yield reduction of transgenic plants.Inducible promoters only drive exogenous genes to express in special conditions,such as abiotic stress and environment inducible.This paper reviews the types and functions of inducible promoters.The prospect of stress-induced promoters was also discussed.