Xiaohong Yang's research while affiliated with Chinese Academy of Forestry and other places

... Highly variable regions offer valuable phylogenetic information. For example, variable regions aid can be used as development of molecular markers and species delimitation [38][39][40][41]. A good molecular marker must be a short, representative DNA fragment with high variability and amenable to amplification [42]. ...

... B.A. Yurtsev [9] discussed the ways of morphological evolution of the section Verticillares species and assumed that the evolutionary transformations occur owing to adaptation to various habitat conditions, i.e., growth in high mountains, on saline, rocky, and sandy substrates. The fact that ecological differentiation promotes genetic divergence was repeatedly shown for several plant species inhabiting complex heterogeneous landscapes [42][43][44][45][46][47]. In a range of cases, genetic divergence is associated specifically with the habitat substrate [42,45], as was found, including for representatives of rare species of the Astragalus genus, a sis- ter group to the genus Oxytropis, growing in the intermountain region of western North America. ...