Surviving Salt: How Do Extremophiles Do It?

ImmersedImmersed in waters saltier than chicken soup, salt-tolerant “halophilic” microorganisms are able to thrive in conditions that would reduce a less-adapted organism to a shriveled remnant. One way halophilic archaea avoid this fate is by bathing their molecular machinery in a similarly salty intracellular environment that would cause ordinary proteins to lose their shape. How do the proteins inside these cells survive?