Objective  Genetic relationship of 40 sweet cherry cultivars were analyzed.

  Methods  SRAP and SCoT molecular markers were used to determine the genetic diversity of sweet cherry varieties.

  Results  Six pairs of SRAP primers and 7 pairs of SCoT primers with distinct bands and polymorphism were selected as the markers to obtain 67 and 69 amplified bands representing 90.54% and 93.24% of polymorphism, respectively, from the 40 cultivars. Based either on SRAP with a similarity coefficient of about 0.79 or on SCoT with a similarity coefficient of about 0.77, the cultivars could be divided into 6 groups. Thus, the sweet cherry cultivars collected from different regions could have gone through numerous genetic exchanges becoming low in variation. Therefore, not surprisingly, most of the yellow varieties were grouped into one single category.

  Conclusion   The SRAP and SCoT markers successfully helped examine the genetic diversity of 40 sweet cherry cultivars collected from various regions. The result obtained would facilitate further studies in the germplasm utilization and breeding of sweet cherries.