Environmental samples from Antarctica and China for RNA virus discovery

We obtained 49 samples from Antarctica and China for RNA virus discovery and confirmation. The sample types included marine (N = 5), freshwater (N = 12), soil (N = 19), and sediment (N = 13), of which eight sediment samples were collected at the Ross Sea station in Antarctica between January and February 2022, and the others were from Zhejiang, Guangdong, Hubei, and Heilongjiang provinces of China between August and October 2022. For each of these samples, DNA and RNA were simultaneously extracted. The extracted nucleic acid was then subject to library construction. Paired-end (150 bp) sequencing of these libraries was subsequently performed using the Illumina NovaSeq 6000 platform (Illumina, the United States).