Analysis finds diversity on the smallest scales in sulfur-cycling salt marsh microbes

At the surface, salt marshes and their windswept grasses can look deceptively simple. But those marshes are teeming with biodiversity, from the insects and migrating birds in the air all the way down to the microbes that live in the soil. Scientists from the Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL) have discovered that even among the sulfur-cycling microbes that are responsible for the "rotten egg gas" smell in salt marsh air, diversity extends all the way to genomes and even to individual nucleotides.