The shortest unique substring (SUS) problem is an active line of research in the field of string algorithms and has several applications in bioinformatics and information retrieval. The initial version of the problem was proposed by Pei et al. [ICDE’13]. Over the years, many variants and extensions have been pursued, which include positional-SUS, interval-SUS, approximate-SUS, palindromic-SUS, range-SUS, etc. In this article, we highlight some of the key results and summarize the recent developments in this area