Abstract:Abstract:A total of 1 323 Rhododendron simsii ESTs downloaded from the NCBI database were analyzed, from which 912 non redundant ESTs were obtained. Sixty five EST SSRs distributed in 61 ESTs were found by the Tandem repeat finder software with a frequency of 7.127 2% Especially, dinucleotide repeat was the main type in R. simsii, accounting for 66.153 8% of all SSRs. The mononucleotide and trinucleotide repeats took up to 15.384 6% and 9.230 8%, respectively. By contract, the rest types including tetranucleotide, pentanucleotide and hexanucleotide repeats were the least. Totally, 90.769 2% of these SSR loci were perfect repeats. These EST sequences containing SSR loci would facilitate the further development of specific SSR markers, as well as the study of biodiversity and genetic structure of R. simsii