Abstract: Bentgrass is a major cool season turfgrass. Few molecular markers have been developed for bentgrass compared to field crops. In this study, 1 058 EST-SSR primer pairs developed by our lab from wheat, barley, maize, sorghum and rice were screened on bentgrass. Of which, 620(58.60%) primer pairs showed amplification. Effective primer pairs from wheat, barley, maize, sorghum and rice were 313 (61.49%), 30 (63.83%)，101 (51.53%)，11 (35.48%)，and 165 (60.00%), respectively. Furthermore, 53 EST-SSR primers were selected to investigate the genetic relationship of eight bentgrass cultivars, and 51
(94.34%) primer pairs showed polymorphism. In total, 368 alleles were found with an average of 2.69 alleles per primer. The PIC (polymorphism information content) for each polymorphic primer varied from 0.49 to 0.93, with an average of 0.78. The average genetic similarity coefficient (GS) among the eight cultivars was 0.72(ranged from 0.48 to 0.86). Clustering analysis indicated that the eight bentgrass cultivars were clustered into two groups based on 0.75 of GS. GroupⅠconsists only Highland, group Ⅱincludes the others, which could be divided into two subgroups based on 0.80 includes Alpha, Penncross and Blackspin, The sub-group Ⅱ-2 includes Putter, L-93, Cato and Penn A4.

Key words: bentgrass, EST-SSR, transferability, genetic diversity