The value of barley (
Hordeum vulgare
L.) has steadily gained importance over the years. The economic and consumer importance of barley is constantly being re‐evaluated as new market niches and end‐uses become evident. Improvement strategies have generally employed conventional breeding methods, including mutation‐breeding approaches. However newer technology‐driven improvement strategies offer promising new perspectives and include genetic transformation. Barley was generally recalcitrant to tissue culture and transformation, but is now fairly amenable to genetic transformation by particle bombardment as well as by
Agrobacterium
. Target traits for modification have encompassed malting, nutritional and disease‐resistance attributes in barley. However, with the emerging trends in high‐throughput genomic sequencing and the need for functional validation of cloned genes, genetic transformation of barley has become an important tool and use of approaches such as transposable elements mediated transformation offers the possibility of producing large numbers of transgenic barley plants. Approaches based on the RNAi technology are also likely to advance understanding of the functions of cloned genes in barley. In this chapter, there is a wide‐ranging discussion on barley genetic transformation, prospects, challenges and risk assessment and environmental concerns.