The development of expressed sequence tag-derived simple sequence repeats(EST-SSRs) provided a useful tool for investigating plant genetic diversity.In the present study,22 polymorphic EST-SSRs from grain soybean were identified and used to assess the genetic diversity in 48 vegetable soybean accessions.Among the 22 EST-SSR loci,tri-nucleotides were the most abundant repeats,accounting for 50.00% of the total motifs.GAA was the most common motif among tri-nucleotide repeats,with a frequency of 18.18%.Polymorphic analysis identified a total of 71 alleles,with an average of 3.23 per locus.The polymorphism information content(PIC) values ranged from 0.144 to 0.630,with a mean of 0.386.Observed heterozygosity(H o) values varied from 0.0196 to 1.0000,with an average of 0.6092,while the expected heterozygosity(H e) values ranged from 0.1502 to 0.6840,with a mean value of 0.4616.Principal coordinate analysis and phylogenetic tree analysis indicated that the accessions could be assigned to different groups based to a large extent on their geographic distribution,and most accessions from China were clustered into the same groups.These results suggest that Chinese vegetable soybean accessions have a narrow genetic base.The results of this study indicate that EST-SSRs from grain soybean have high transferability to vegetable soybean,and that these new markers would be helpful in taxonomy,molecular breeding,and comparative mapping studies of vegetable soybean in the future.