Optimization of Soil Virus Enrichment Method in Alpine Meadows of the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau

Viruses are widely distributed in soils, profoundly affect biogeochemical cycles by regulating host communities and driving element cycles, including functional processes such as pollutant degradation that are of great value to environmental pollution and its restoration. The Qinghai-Tibet Plateau is an ecological security barrier in China. Its alpine meadow soils have dense roots of grass layers and thick humus layers, which leads to challenges such as severe impurity interference and low elution efficiency in traditional soil virus enrichment methods. In response to the above problems, this study optimized the virus enrichment process for the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau meadow soil system: the introduction of KPEG-M eluent promoted virus desorption, the two-step filtration strategy alleviated the clogging of the filter membrane, and the centrifugal ultrafiltration tube was used to improve the concentration efficiency. Compared with the traditional virus enrichment schemes proposed for soils such as temperate forest peatlands in North America and subtropical farmlands in China, the optimized system significantly increased the DNA recovery (<italic>P</italic>&lt;0.05) by 11.25%~44.30%, and the concentration stage was more convenient to operate. The construction of this optimized system provides support for the analysis of the composition, diversity and function of alpine soil virus communities.