Abstract: A PCR method using arbitrary oligonucleotide primers and totalDNA was employed to analyze cherry germplasm polymorphisms. Out of 130 primers, 48 10-mer primerswere selected and 8 cherry species and 2 interspecific progenies were analyzed. The phylogenetic analysis was carried out using two distance-matrix methods and a dendrogram was generated to show the relationships among species and cultivars. The results showed that there were 840 amplified loci in total; 23 sweet cherry and 4 sour cherry cultivars were clustered together with 569 and 247 polymorphic loci respectively which ccounted for 67.74% and 29.40% of the total variation. Prunus tomentosa T. , P. fruticosa var. aucta P. and P. humilis B. formed a monophyletic group. A close relationship between P. pseudocerasus L. and Colt, which formed another closely related group, was observed while P. avium L. , P. cerasus L. and other cherry species were more divergent. The range of genetic distances was from 0.0623 to 0.2719 among Prunus species, which were genetically distinct. The topology of the tree was generally in agreement with taxonomical classification of Prunus. The results indicated that except sweet cherry‘Hongdeng’variety there were one ormore cultivar-specific RAPD markers in cherry species and cultivars. Using these specific markers, cherry species and varieties could be identified and good characteristics of hybrids could be selected early.

Key words: Cherry, RAPD, Species, Cultivar identification, Genetic relationship