Abstract: In order to explore the reason of etiolated seedling from root suckers of Chinese jujube，morphological index，chlorophyll content，mineral content and molecular variation of etiolated and normal seedling from root suckers of jujube trees were studied in this paper. The results showed that there was no significant change in morphological index between etiolated seedling and healthy seedling from root suckers，but the chlorophyll content of etiolated seedling was significantly lower than that of healthy ones，the mineral content of N，P，K，Mn，Cu，Zn and Fe were significantly increased，Ca and Mg were no significant change. The AFLP analysis showed that there were no obvious differences on the level of genome between etiolated seedling from root suckers and healthy plants. The results of cDNA-AFLP and RT-PCR showed that the Acyltransfer gene expression was higher in etiolated seedlings compared to healthy ones，expression of Ty3-gypsy was decreased dramatically and the expression of GAGA-binding transcriptional activator wasreduced slightly in etiolated ones. So the change of expression of GAGA- binding transcriptional activatorand Ty3-gypsy may influence the chlorophyll synthesis，and then resulted in the etiolation.But in that stress case the expression of genes related photorespiration，such as Acyltransfer，were increased. Those results showed that there were regulatory networks among those genes.

Key words: Chinese jujube, etiolated seedling from root suckers, chlorophyll, minerals, AFLP, cDNA-AFLP, semi-quantitative RT-PCR