Haloarchaea flourish in hypersaline environments, and researchers are interested in learning how these microbes have learned to adapt from marine to hypersaline conditions by studying the microbial communities in Antarctic lakes, some of which have salinities 10 times that of seawater. To shed light on the global biogeography in the haloarchaeal gene pool, a team led by University of New South Wales (UNSW)-Sydney professor Rick Cavicchioli compared two strains of haloarchaea from different Antarctic lakes. To assess the genomic variation in haloarchaea, they also characterized metagenomes (collections of partial genomes) from six hypersaline Antarctic lakes.