Abstract: The aquatic animals are easily subjected to autolysis because of its high content of water and endogenous enzymes, and this phenomenon brings great difficulties to its storage, transportation and processing.It has become the bottleneck of aquatic products processing. In this paper, the research status of autolysis was summarized from the aspects of influence factors, biochemical changes, autolytic mechanism and autolysis technology applications.The developing trend was also prospected, and this may provide theoretic basis for the further studies of aquatic animals autolysis.