Together with the Eisen and Facciotti labs at UC Davis, we sequenced and annotated the genomes of eight Halophilic Archaea. These are bugs that love to grow in environments with very high salt, and are often found in solar salterns, crystalizer ponds where salt is dried out of the ocean. The challenge for this project was that all of the sequence annotation and analysis was completed at the American Society of Microbiology’s 2008 annual meeting in Philadelphia, PA. We love these kind of crazy challenges, and were able to annotate the data, find new discoveries and present them to the audience in hours. For more information, visit the halophile website.