Abstract: By clustering the 12757 ESTs of tea downloaded from NCBI, a unigene database of tea was successfully built. It was found that the redundancy rate for ESTs from tea was approximately 68.2%. An EST-SNP exploiting system for tea was established preliminarily. The SNP distribution was identified. The occurrence frequency for coding region SNP in tea was appropriately 0.58%. It meant that there was average one SNP in every 200bp of tea ESTs. Furthermore, the hybrid rate for tea genome was deduced to be 0.38%, averagely one hybrid DNA site per 300bp. Totally 818 candidated SNP were exploited from 237 multigene clusters. Then 25 pairs of SNP primers were designed and 75% of these sites were validated to be polymorphism by DNA sequencing.

Key words: tea plant, Camellia sinensis, EST, SNP