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Derivative formulae for heat semigroups are used to give gradient estimates for harmonic functions on regular domains in Riemannian manifolds. This probabilistic method provides an alternative to coupling techniques, as introduced by Cranston, and allows us to improve some known estimates. We discuss two slightly different ways to exploit derivative formulae where each one should be interesting by itself. 1998 Academic Press Key Words: Brownian motion; harmonic function; heat kernel; gradient estimate