The high-density genetic maps could be beneficial for kiwifruit breeding programmes and improving the kiwifruit draft genome assembly. As a functionally dioecious plant with male and female reproductive structures on separate plants, kiwifruits present unique challenges for breeding and production.

The authors have identified three sex-specific simple sequence repeats (SSR) markers that can accurately distinguish males and females. This information is useful in kiwifruit breeding and commercial production for marker-assisted selection for sex. By locating the three SSR markers in 1-2 Mb on chromosome 25, the sex determination region (SDR) in kiwifruit was narrowed to a 1 Mb region.