Abstract: 15 387 ESTs of apricot from NCBI were screened using MISA software. The results showed that 1 353 SSRs were mined from 1 073 ESTs with a frequency of 8.79%. Di-，tri- and tetra nucleotide repeats EST-SSRs were dominant，accounting for 23.50%，38.80% and 23.43%，respectively. Fifty primer pairs were designed for partial EST-SSRs and used for PCR amplification with 40 primer pairs showing amplifications while 25 were polymorphic. PCR products from 7 EST-SSR primer pairs were selected for sequence analysis where 57.1% of the fragments contained SSRs. EST-SSR motifs were conserved between mei and apricot. Accordingly，the proportion of developing efficient EST-SSR primers from apricot was 3.98%. The best twenty workable EST-SSR primer pairs were chosen to generate DNA fingerprints of 24 apricot，16 flower-mei and 8 fruit-mei cultivars. Using these EST-SSR primer pairs，mei and apricot were classified into 2 groups. The EST-SSR primers designed from apricot sequences showed high polymorphism in mei varieties and exhibited high transferability between mei and apricot cultivars；Fruit-mei and flower-mei were genetically the same plant.

Key words: apricot, mei, EST-SSR, analysis of genetic diversity