The flue-cured and Burley tobacco industries have thus far relied solely on the intrinsic gene-pool of the tobacco plant itself for traits that enhance yield, disease resistance, leaf quality etc. Meanwhile, over the last 25 years the tobacco plant has been widely used as a convenient research species for developing transgenic (genetically modified; GM) strategies that employ genes from other sources for crop improvement, resulting in the demonstration of many new performance and input traits of potential use for tobacco production. We are conducting a comprehensive survey of this work, and also considering how and whether GM tobacco could be safely and securely produced in the open-field environment without compromising production of the conventional, non-GM crop. We anticipate that this study will be valuable to growers and their organizations as a base of knowledge concerning those GM technologies that might be employed in traditional Burley and flue-cured varieties in the future. Our progress to-date has comprised extensive literature searches in several scientific/technical databases, followed by sorting and filtering of the many thousands of publications to remove replicated material. Patents, government-regulated field trials, and interviews with industry and growers are also contributing useful information. A classification format has been designed that will enable the final search results to be interpreted easily in terms of what traits have been demonstrated in tobacco plants through GM technology, how effective they are, whether they have been expressed in commercial tobacco varieties and field-tested, etc. Our findings will be summarized in a report which will be openly available on-line.