Abstract: About 29685 ESTs of sheep’s skin from NCBI were mined to develop EST-SSR markers. Totally, 1456 SSRs were identified from 1364 ESTs using SSRHunter soft tools. The frequency of EST-SSRs was 4.9%. The dinucleotide repeat motif was the most abundant SSR accounting for 32.14% followed by 28.23, 7.14, 25.21 and 7.28%, respectively for tri, hexa, penta and tetra-nucleotide repeats. Among the di-nucleotide repeats, AC/TG (58.33%) were the most abundant type. About 261 primer pairs were designed from microsatellite among which 62 pairs could show clear PCR products by electrophoresisand 5 of these primers revealed moderate to high Polymorphism Information Content (PIC) in Chinese Merino sheep. The mean PIC value was 0.6971, ranging from 0.5499-0.7440.