DNA
fingerprinting technologies have been rapidly developed with the appearance of kinds of new DNA molecular markers recently.
This paper briefly reviewed the basic principle, advantages and disadvantages of several
DNA fingerprinting technology, such as restriction fragment polymorphism(RFLP), random amplified polymorphic DNA (RAPD), amplified fragmentlength polymorphism (AFLP), simple sequence repeat (SSR), inter-simple sequence repeat (ISSR) and single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) etc. And its application in crops germplasm, including the identification of crop varieties, the examination of seed purity, the study of relationship and classification of crop varieties and the exact protection of crop varieties patents. In addition, the problems existing in the application of DNA
Fingerprinting technology and the ways to solve them were also briefly discussed, such as the contradiction between DNA extraction methods and application of breeding populations, limited application due to complicated relatively technique of many DNA fingerprinting, etc.