Lycorine,an important isoquinoline alkaloid,is the effective component of Amaryllidaceae family plants.Lycorine possesses unique structures including a rigid ring skeleton,contiguous chiral centers and tertiary amine,increasing the difficulty to rich the structural diversities.In recent years,accumulated evidence shows that lycorine can be a lead compound for many therapeutic applications,including anti-cancer,anti-virus,anti-inflammation,anti-parasitic and AChE inhibition.Especially,lycorine exhibits great potential in anti-cancer and anti-virus applications because of its broad-spectrum activity and novel mechanism.However,it is still a complicated issue to identify the specific targets of lycorine.The relationship among its various mechanisms of action for a certain pharmacological activity is also elusive.To take full advantage of this natural resource for drug discovery,more interest has been drawn to the structural modification and mechanism study of lycorine.For the sake of facilitating future research,this review systematically summarized the updating research progress on the pharmacological activities and structure-activity relationships of lycorine.