Histones, as the basic components of nucleosome, are essential to chromatin structure and function. To adapt to various states of chromatin, corresponding histone variants are incorporated in nucleosome, and certain modifications also occur on the variants' tails. These variants change the conformation and stability of nucleosome to facilitate transcriptional activation or deactivation, DNA repairing, heterochromatin formation, and others. During histone exchange, chromatin remodeling complex facilitates histone variant deposition into nucleosome, and different variants have diverse deposition pathways. Recently, research on histone variants is not only a new hotspot in epigenetics, but also a new annotation of "histone code". In addition, histone exchange reveals new changing mechanism of DNA-histone interaction.