Low phosphorus (P) availability in soil and consequent P-deficiency represent the major constraint to plant production and quality improving in many countries. Selecting or developing new plant germplasms or varieties that are better adapted to low soil P conditions through the modern transgenic breeding approach may provide a new opportunity to improve the efficiency of phosphorus by plants. Recently, many molecular biology labs have identified hundreds of genes associated with plant phosphorus metabolic pathway. But only a few were used in plant transgenic breeding and the research progress were very laggardly. The reasons may be related to the unclear gene functions, different gene types and the collaboration problems between breeding and molecular biology researchers. In this review, we summarized the research progress of phosphorus metabolism related candidate genes in plant, and the gene types were also analyzed. More important in this paper is that the functions and latent values of all these genes related to phosphorus-metabolism were pointed out and concluded. So it is significant to offer some useful genes to plant transgenic breeding with high P-efficiency, and also very important to understand the molecular mechanisms of P-efficiency in plant.