A collaborative team led by researchers at the University of Texas (UT) at Austin, the HudsonAlpha Institute for Biotechnology (HudsonAlpha), and the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Joint Genome Institute (JGI), a DOE Office of Science User Facility, has discovered that the candidate bioenergy feedstock switchgrass has adapted to expand its habitat range, but at what cost? In the following guest piece, postdoctoral researcher Joseph Napier from the Juenger lab and computational biologist Paul Grabowski of HudsonAlpha outline the questions they asked—and answered—in the study that recently appeared in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).