In dioecious crops such as Actinidia arguta (kiwiberries), some of the main challenges when breeding for fruit characteristics are the selection of potential male parents and the long juvenile period. Currently, breeding values of male parents are estimated through progeny tests, which makes the breeding of new kiwiberry cultivars time-consuming and costly. The application of best linear unbiased prediction (BLUP) would allow direct estimation of sex-related traits and speed up kiwiberry breeding. In this study, we used a linear mixed model approach to estimate narrow sense heritability for one vine-related trait and five fruit-related traits for two incomplete factorial crossing designs. We obtained BLUPs for all genotypes, taking into consideration whether the relationship was pedigree-based or marker-based. Owing to the high cost of genome sequencing, it is important to understand the effects of different sources of relationship matrices on estimating breeding values across a breeding population. Because of the increasing implementation of genomic selection in crop breeding, we compared the effects of incorporating different sources of information in building relationship matrices and ploidy levels on the accuracy of BLUPs’ heritability and predictive ability. As kiwiberries are autotetraploids, multivalent chromosome formation and occasionally double reduction can occur during meiosis, and this can affect the accuracy of prediction. This study innovates the breeding programme of autotetraploid kiwiberries. We demonstrate that the accuracy of BLUPs of male siblings, without phenotypic observations, strongly improved when a tetraploid marker-based relationship matrix was used rather than parental BLUPs and female siblings with phenotypic observations.

在软枣猕猴桃（猕猴桃）等雌雄异株作物中，果实特性育种时面临的一些主要挑战是潜在父本的选择和较长的幼年期。目前，父本的育种价值是通过后代测试来估算的，这使得猕猴桃新品种的选育耗时且成本高昂。最佳线性无偏预测（BLUP）的应用将允许直接估计性别相关性状并加速猕猴桃育种。在本研究中，我们使用线性混合模型方法来估计两种不完全因子杂交设计的一种葡萄相关性状和五种水果相关性状的狭义遗传力。我们获得了所有基因型的 BLUP，并考虑到这种关系是基于谱系的还是基于标记的。由于基因组测序的成本很高，了解不同来源的关系矩阵对估计育种群体育种值的影响非常重要。由于基因组选择在作物育种中的应用日益广泛，我们比较了在构建关系矩阵和倍性水平时纳入不同信息源对 BLUP 遗传力和预测能力准确性的影响。由于猕猴桃是同源四倍体，减数分裂过程中可能会发生多价染色体形成和偶尔的双重减少，这会影响预测的准确性。本研究创新了同源四倍体猕猴桃育种方案。我们证明，当使用基于四倍体标记的关系矩阵而不是具有表型观察的亲本 BLUP 和女性兄弟姐妹时，没有表型观察的男性兄弟姐妹的 BLUP 准确性得到了显着提高。