Tobacco is a model plant widely used in transgenic research for years, but genetically modified (GM) tobacco was extremely limited in commercial applications. The ability to protect commercial tobacco products from transgenic pollution has become an important problem in the tobacco industry. At present, P-35S promoter, NPTII selective marker gene and T-NOS terminator are three common targets for GM tobacco screening, but they cannot cover all transgenic tobacco events, and some GM tobacco events with special transgenic elements will be missed. So, we need a new screening strategy which can cover the GM tobacco events as much as possible. We searched for articles on Google Scholar and PubMed by using key word “transgenic tobacco” or “GM tobacco”. And 229 related articles in recent 10 years were collected. By reading these articles, we investigated all types of transgenic elements and their use frequency in various tobacco transgenic events. We found that only 86% of these events can be detected by using the combination of P-35S, NPTII, and T-NOS. In order to completely eliminate the possibility of missed detection, based on the information available for various transgenic elements in tobacco GM events, we proposed a more comprehensive set of transgenic elements as PCR amplified targets. It includes P-35S promoter, NPTII/HPT/Bar/aadA selective marker genes, GUS reporter gene and T-NOS terminator. These target sequences represent the most common elements in transgenic tobacco, thereby, nearly 100% of the transgenic events in tobacco can be detected by using these elements for screening target sequences. Also, a genetic elements of transgenic tobacco database was established concurrently with this study.