Abstract: Centromere-specific histone H3 (CENH3) is one of the most characterized, located on functional centromeres in eukaryotes, and found to be the fundamental feature of functional centromeres. CENH3 has been shown to evolve rapidly, including the diversity of the N-terminal region and some parts of C-terminal histone fold domain, which play an important role in the assembly of Centromeres and segregation and transmission of chromosomes. This review introduced CENH3 mainly focused on its find, envolution, structure, function and application.