Abstract: Ambient ionization mass spectrometry has become a hot area in the field of mass spectrometry due to its real-time and in situ analysis recently. As a typical kind of ambient ionization, direct analysis in real-time (DART) has attracted extensive attention since introduced in 2005. Great efforts have been applied in the research of the ionization mechanism and application of DART-MS. Penning ionization, proton transfer, electron capture and transient micro-environment mechanism have been reported involved in the DART ionization process. Due to its advantages of stability, operability, and analysis speed, DART-MS has been widely used in the environment monitoring, food and drug safety, biomedical analysis, and public security administration. Great achievement was inspiring, but several problems still remained, such as quantitative performance and direct analysis of analytes inside bulk sample. Therefore, in this paper, the mechanism of DART, the application of DART-MS in China were briefly summarized and discussed during the past two years, and the development tendency of DART-MS was prospected.