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Conifers are a group of woody plants that dominate vast forest ecosystems and represent a fundamental source of raw materials such as wood and other forest-derived products of great interest for humankind. Thus, understanding the molecular basis underlying the growth and development of these woody plants, as well as the response of these plants to environmental cues, is of paramount importance for the conservation of coniferous natural forests and the production of new tree lines with improved traits for sustainable forest plantations. Conifers have a series of characteristics that hinder the application of genetics and molecular biological approaches to generate data of high biological value. However, nowadays the biological sciences are dominated by omics techniques that have extensively increased the fundamental knowledge of conifer biology over the last decade. Novel resources are currently available for functional genomics research, and these resources are accessible to researchers all over the world. Recent advances in next-generation sequencing and assembly capacity have enabled whole-genome sequencing of several conifer species and have favoured the development of functional genomics studies in these non-model plant species. Currently, it is possible to obtain large amounts of data to explore the transcriptome or genome of any species with a limited budget. However, functional genomics studies using genetics approaches and gene manipulation remain tremendously challenging, and the application of recent gene editing techniques in conifers is awaited. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]