Abstract: Pennycress (Thlaspi arvense L.) belongs to the Thlaspi genus of the Cruciferae family, which is a dual-role herb plant of both medical and food usages. Pennycress has got strong ecological adaptability and can accumulate abundant oil in the seed, therefore harboring great values in the resource development and utilization. In some developed countries, benefited from the earlier commenced research, pennycress has already played an important role in the local agricultural production cycle. For instance, pennycress can be used as the typical winter cover crop to help ameliorate the soil arability, serving for the biodiesel preparation and replenishing the production of oil-bearing materials. By contrast, the comprehensive study and industrial development of pennycress in China is rather limited, which is still focused on the traditional Chinese medicine field and mostly being viewed as weed. With the rapid progress made in the modern life science research technology, advantages of pennycress have been increasingly revealed. As a result, the breeding improvement of pennycress via biotechnology has become possible. In this respect, metabolic engineering of the pennycress lipid property in order to develop novel vegetable oil, or even heterologously produce high-value fatty acid (e.g. nervonic acid etc.) has thus shown great potential. This paper has summarized and envisaged the most recent research progress in the pennycress resource development and utilization, as well as the lipid metabolic engineering improvement. Aiming to provide useful information for the fundamental, popularization and application research of pennycress in China.