Regarding Experiment 1 and RBH inference, we showed that our SparkBLAST results can be post-processed to infer shared genes, then generating added-value to the similarity analysis. That also means that RBH experiments using SparkBLAST are potentially scalable to many more genomes, and can be even used as part of other Blast-based homology inference software such as OrthoMCL . Considering Experiment 2, results indicate that 1.27% of the Bermuda metagenomics proteins and 1.4% of the Búzios metagenomic proteins represent potential homologs to the 10 radiation-resistant bacteria, and as far as we know no related studies have been published to date. Those potential homologs will be further investigated in another study.