The genetic improvement of tropical fruit trees is limited when compared to progress achieved in temperate fruit trees and annual crops. Tropical fruit tree breeding programs require signi fi cant resources to develop new cultivars that are adapted to modern shipping and storage requirements. The use of molecular markers in tropical fruit tree breeding is greatly assisting in solving a number of dif fi cult challenges for breeders such as the development of complex family structures for recombination mapping and for recurrent selection. A review of the literature on molecular markers development and new techniques for increasing single-nucleotide polymorphic markers is discussed. The development of marker-assisted breeding for these tropical tree crops is also discussed.