**6. Conclusions**

SSR is a very useful molecular marker system due to abundance in the genomes and its codominant inheritance as well as high repeatability. They have also a high level of transferability between closely related species as in the genus *Pistacia*. They have been used for assaying diversity in natural populations, marker discovery, germplasm characterization, parental identification, genetic linkage mapping, and evolutionary studies. There were a very limited number of SSR markers for *Pistacia* species until several years ago; however, next-generation sequencing (NGS) technology has allowed to develop plenty of SSRs since 2016 in *Pistacia*.

*P. vera* is the most important species in the genus *Pistacia* due to commercial value of its nuts. There are about 1500 published SSR markers, and 2/3 of them are polymorphic that were developed from *P. vera* tissues. There are also published polymorphic SSR markers for wild *Pistacia* species. They were developed mostly from cultivated pistachio due to their high transferability rate. The published SSRs were also used to construct SSR-based genetic linkage maps in pistachio.

In a conclusion, there are currently an adequate number of SSR markers for cultivated *P. vera* and for several wild *Pistacia* species such as *P. atlantica*. It is still necessary to develop polymorphic SSR loci for some other *Pistacia* species such as *P. integerrima* and *P. eurycarpa* which have been used as rootstock for cultivated pistachio.
