Abstract: There is a rich resource of shellfishes in coastal waters in China.The shellfish meat and its by-products are mainly used to chilled processing, dried and some flavor sauce products.However, a mass of waste by-products are neither beneficial to the environment nor in high value processing, in a certain extent.In view of this, more and more domestic and foreign researches come to pay attention to the enzymatic preparation and purification of bioactive peptide from shellfish, the exploration of its structure-activity relationship and its application of active peptide.The status quo and the problems exist in the present were reviewed and summarized in this paper.Given that, shellfish active peptides had potential applications in medicine, cosmetics and food industry, etc.