Sunflower is well known as an important oilseed crop for the consumers, and consumed as roasted, confectionary and bird feed seed. The plant has been subjected to the improvement by plant breeders resulting in the yellow revolution in many countries. Russian plant breeders improved oil contents of sunflower seed that converted this crop from a roadside plant to world famous oilseed crop. The cultivated germplasm retained 50% of genetic diversity present in crop wild relative. This may be threatened due to worldwide hybrid cultivation which share common parentage and source of cytoplasmic male sterility. Therefore, there is a need to use the available genetic diversity within cultivated and wild germplasm to develop pre breeding lines and elite breeding material with good combining ability. Sunflower breeding revolves around the development of breeding lines suitable for hybrid breeding, diseases, abiotic stress and herbicide resistance. Marker-assisted selection has been validated for rust resistance, downy mildew resistance, oleic acid contents and fertility restorer genes. Transgenic sunflower development could be used to enhance oil content and quality. To make sunflower more competitive toward other oil crops higher levels of resistance against pathogens and better yield performance are required. In addition, optimizing plant architecture toward a more complex growth type for higher plant densities has the potential to considerably increase yields per hectare. Integrative approaches combining omic technologies (genomics, transcriptomics, proteomics, metabolomics and phenomics) using bioinformatic tools will facilitate the identification of target genes and markers for complex traits and will give a better insight into the mechanisms behind the traits.