The researchers reasoned that any proteins that gave the fish an advantage in a cold, oxygen-rich environment would be expressed at high levels in the Antarctic fish. But it could also be true that specific tissues simply expressed more of certain proteins.

To get a better idea of whether the genes that were "upregulated" in D. mawsoni enhanced its survival in the Antarctic, the researchers compared gene expression in D. mawsoni and in the same tissues of several unrelated, warm-water fish. They found that most of the genes that were highly expressed in the Antarctic fish were not elevated in the warm-water fish.

When they analyzed the upregulated genes, the researchers found that many of them coded for proteins that respond to environmental stress. There were many chaperone proteins, including "heat shock proteins," for example, which protect other proteins from being damaged by stresses such as extreme cold (or heat).