 I'm a microbiologist, and unlike normal microbiologists, I don't really grow stuff. I use DNA-based techniques, and so I take samples and I extract the DNA from them and then analyze this DNA to find signal for life. Where I work is the Dry Valleys. The Dry Valleys is the largest place ice-free area in Antarctica. It's essentially a cold desert, but it's a very unusual desert in many, many ways, most significantly because there's a lack of normal plants and a lack of animals that you may consider to be animals, and that means the microorganisms in the Dry Valleys essentially make up the bulk of the biomass and are responsible for the vast majority of function in their system. What I've been looking at is how these microbial communities are distributed across the entire Dry Valleys. Now, being a cold desert, a lot of people may think that it's a desert, there's a lot of wind, so things are all constantly being mixed. It should be the same bugs everywhere, but what we have found is quite the opposite. You actually find very, very different bugs in two Dry Valleys which are adjacent to each other, and it's a three-hour hike from one to the other. Of course, we have really a poor understanding of why that's the case, and that in this particular system would act as a great model system for us to understand how natural processes determine where we see the microbial communities that we see. So the more understanding we have for these basic processes, the better we are able to know how these communities would respond to change and how we can best manipulate them to serve our needs.