Halophilic archaea thrive in harsh environments like the salt flat shown here, on the Salar de Uyuni (Bolivia). In this issue of PLoS Biology, a Research Article (see Tadeo et al., e1000257) explains that, at the molecular level, the proteins of these extremophiles have evolved toward a biased amino acid composition, which reduces their interactions with the solvent.
Image Credit: Luca Galuzzi, www.galuzzi.it
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