Abstract:Sixty-one sorghum germplasm resources were evaluated on dry and irrigated land in order to identify those with high drought resistance and superior yield performance for sorghum breeding. The results showed that 14 materials were drought resistant above grade 3, of which 2 were grade 1. In the mean time, in order to study the genetic variation of sorghum at molecular level, 109 simple sequence repeat (SSR) markers were explored to characterize those germplasm resources. The results revealed that 51 pairs of SSR markers were highly polymorphic, and 508 alleles were amplified with the average of 10 alleles per marker. The mean polymorphism information content (PIC) was 0.6615 with a range from 0.0322 to 0.9134. The sorghum materials were classified into 4 groups based on the SSR experiments. The clustered results were similar to those based on geographical origins and genetic backgrounds. Genetic distances among Chinese sorghum restorers were relatively close indicating that they had a narrow genetic basis. It is suggested that the genetic basis of the restorer lines should be broaden in future breeding program.