Standard solar models provide a reference framework across a number of research fields: solar and stellar models, solar neutrinos, particle physics the most conspicuous among them. The accuracy of the physical description of the global properties of the Sun that SSMs provide has been challenged in the last decade by a number of developments in stellar spectroscopic techniques. Over the same period of time the four solar neutrino fluxes from the pp-chains that are associated with 99% of the nuclear energy generated in the Sun have been measured. Together with helioseismology, they provide stringent constraints to the solar interior that can be used to test not only our understanding of solar (and stellar) physics, but also to use the Sun as a laboratory for particle physics.

This talk will be roughly divided in three parts. The first one will cover the most recent results on solar models and the solar abundance problem. In the second, I will show that in the framework of standard solar models, and regardless of the solar abundance problem, a "best-fit SSM" that is a very good phenomenological description of the solar interior can be constructed. As an application of the best-fit SSM, I will present tight constraints on dark energy channels (that cannot exceed a few percent of the solar luminosity) can be set for exotic particles. In the last part of the talk, an alternative approach is taken and different models of asymmetric dark matter particles are incorporated into solar models to study their impact on solar observables (neutrinos and helioseismology) and look for potential solutions to the solar abundance problem.