Arachidonic acid(AA) is one of the necessary polyunsaturated fatty acids for human being and can be used in many fields.The preferred method to produce AA is fermentation because of consumer's good graces in recent years.The core issue of AA production by fermentation is the high-yield strain selection.To address this issue,more and more scholars got involved in the study and have achieved some success.This paper reviewed the advances of research on AA strain improvement technology,highlighted five research methods,namely natural screening,physical mutagenesis,chemical mutation,protoplast mutagenesis and cross breeding,and ways to refine the AA strain selection technology was also prospected.