Abstract:Plant membrane-bound transcription factors are thought to be potential components of developmental or environmental signaling due to their unique requirement for proteolytic cleavage to free them from the membrane. In this review， we provide an overview of recent findings on MTFs in plants and we focus on the structural characteristics， the role in the environmental stress response and the release mechanism of the MTFs. The future research direction of the plant membrane-bound transcription factors in plant stress tolerance gene engineering is proposed.