They say you only find what you’re looking for, and that applies in population genetics as well as in life. Population genetic studies rely on scoring known, characterized variation in DNA in order to decipher the history of different populations. However, this known variation may not be sufficient to give a properly resolved picture in every species. In research presented in a recent issue of Applications in Plant Sciences, Dr. Juan Viruel and colleagues used next-generation sequencing (NGS) to identify additional variation in DNA markers of the carob tree, Ceratonia siliqua. This study shows that increasingly affordable NGS technologies can reveal the history of this important tree in higher resolution than possible with traditional methods.