[Objective]It is important to understand the relative relationship among 20 oat(Avena sativa)germ-plasms.[Method]The genetic diversity of 20 oat germplasms were analyzed by using 8 pairs of SSR polymorphic primers.[Result]The results showed that 44 allele variations were amplified,of which 40 were polymorphic loci,with an average of 5.5 loci per primer pair.The average polymorphism information content(PIC),average effective number of alleles,average Shannon index,average expected heterozygosity and average observed heterozygosity were 0.630 8,3.052 4,1.271 0,0.673 1 and 0.552 1,respectively.The clustering results showed that the genetic similar-ity coefficient of 20 oat germplasms ranged from 0.14 to 1.00 and could be divided into 7 groups at the similarity co-efficient of 0.59.Principal component analysis showed that the first three principal components accounted for 83.44%of the total variation.According to the first and second principal components,20 germplasms could be di-vided into four groups,which were basically consistent with the clustering results.[Conclusion]The selected primers had high polymorphism and genetic diversity,and the genetic relationship between different oat germplasms was par-tially correlated with their geographical origin.The results could provide reference for genetic improvement and mo-lecular breeding of oat.