Objective To review the progress of cardiac differentiation and electrophysiological characteristics of bone marrow mesenchymal stem cells.Data sources The databases of PubMed,Springer Link,Science Direct and CNKI were retrieved for papers published from January 2000 to January 2012 with the key words of “bone marrow mesenchymal stem cells,cardiac or heart,electrophysiology or electrophysiological characteristics”.Study selection The articles conced cardiac differentiation and electrophysiological characteristics of bone marrow mesenchymal stem cells were collected.After excluding papers that study purposes are not coincident with this review or contents duplicated,56 papers were intalized at last.Results For the treatment of myocardial infarction and myocardiac disease,the therapeutic effects of transplantation of bone marrow mesenchymal stem cells which have the ability to develop into functional myocardial cells by lots of methods have been proved by many researches.But the arrhythmogenic effect on ventricles affer transplantation of bone marrow mesenchymal stem cells derived myocardial cells is still controversial in animal models.Certainly,the low differentiation efficiency and heterogeneous development of electricial function could be the most important risk for proarrhythmia.Conclusion Many studies of cardiac differentiation of bone marrow mesenchymal stem cells have paid attention to improve the cardiac differentiation rate,and the electrophysiology characteristics of the differentiated cells should be conced for the risk for proarrhythmia as well.