Research on groundnut biotechnology is mainly carried out in the United States and also through international collaborative programs involving Icrisat and Cirad. However, despite its high phenotypic variation, cultivated groundnut shows little molecular polymorphism. The only known application to DNA marker-assisted selection has been the use of genes from wild species in crosses with cultivated species. Until quite recent years, the main results published concerned the development of efficient plant regeneration and gene transfer techniques. Groundnut is an important food and cash crop in the semi-arid tropics but drought and subsequent seeds pre-harvest aflatoxin contamination are the main constraints to crop productivity and quality. Since genetic engineering techniques are available and genetic mapping proves unfruitful, research is now focused on functional genomics. The objective is to provide new molecular tools to assist breeding programmes for the resistance to these two complex traits.