Plant transformation plays a crucial role in modern plant breeding system, leading to the improvement of agronomical traits and fundamental studies of plant science. To develop an efficient and reliable transformation approach, selectable marker is the prerequisite and extremely useful in enabling successful transformation. A number of environmental safe and user-friendly selectable marker genes have been exploited in recent years and utilized to mitigate as a result of concerns for bio-security. Considering the different function of each of the marker genes, these are generally divided into four groups namely positive, visual, negative and pathogen-based, respectively, depending on their selection mechanism. This review describes the mechanism of each of these categories of selected markers and summarizes the current progress in genetic transformation, helping researchers to make better judgement on the choice of selectable markers and accelerate their potential application during plant genetic transformation.