Diversification of the heteroploid Eurasian steppe plant Astragalus onobrychis

The aim of this study is to investigate the genetic, cytological and morphological variation of A. onobrychis in order to shed light on the diversification of a widespread Eurasian steppe species and to elucidate the effect of strongly alternating range size and connectivity during the evolutionary history of this species. To this end we employed genome-wide (RADseq), organellar (sequencing of the plastid ycf1 region) markers analysed in phylogenetic and phylogeographic frameworks as well as relative genome size measurements, chromosome counts and multivariate morphometric analyses.