This paper studied the expert system of genotype discrimination for the STR locus D5S818 based on near-infrared spectroscopy-principal discriminant variate (PDV).Six genotypes,i.e.genotypes 10-10,10-11,11-11,11-12,11-13 and 13-13,were selected as research subjects.Based on the optimum polymerase chain reaction (PCR) conditions,about 54 measuring samples for each genotype were obtained; these samples were tested by near-infrared spectroscopy directly.With differences between homozygote genotypes and heterozygote ones,and differences of the total number of core repeat units between the six genotypes,two types of genotyping-tree structure were constructed and their respective PDV models were studied using the near-infrared spectra of the samples as recognition variables.Finally,based on the classification ability of these two genotyping-tree structures,an optimum expert system of genotype discrimination was built using the PDV models.The result demonstrated that the built expert system had good discriminbility and robustness; without any preprocessing for PCR products,the six genotypes studied could be discriminated rapidly and correctly.It provided a methodological support for establishing an expert system of genotype discrimination for all genotypes of locus D5S818 and other STR loci.