Symbiotic Fungi: Principles and Practice (Soil Biology)

Chapter 7
In Vitro Compartmented Systems
to Study Transport in Arbuscular
Mycorrhizal Symbiosis
H. Dupré de Boulois, L. Voets, and S. Declerck
7.1 Introduction
At the end of the 1960s up to the beginning of the 1970s, numerous studies
investigated the mechanisms behind the higher biomass and phosphorus (P) content
of arbuscular mycorrhizal (AM) plants (e.g. Daft and Nicolson 1966; Sanders and
Tinker 1971, 1973; Hayman and Mosse 1972). However, the essential role of AM
fungi in the uptake of P and its subsequent translocation and transfer to their host
plants awaited the studies of Hattingh et al. (1973), Pearson and Tinker (1975),
Rhodes and Gerdemann (1975) and Cooper and Tinker (1978, 1981) to be convincingly
demonstrated. This major finding was obtained using ingenious bi-compartmented pot
culture systems and isotopic tracers. In these systems, roots and mycorrhizal fungi
were allowed to develop in one compartment (i.e. the root compartment, RC) while
the other compartment (i.e. the hyphal compartment, HC) was restricted to the
exclusive development of the extraradical mycelium (ERM) of the AM fungi. Over
the years, numerous other compartmented pot systems based on the same concept
were developed to study AM fungal transport (see for instance Ames et al. 1983;
Frey and Schuepp 1992; Mäder et al. 1993; Schweiger and Jakobsen 2000; Jansa
et al. 2003; Smith et al. 2003; Tanaka and Yano 2005).
Although these compartmented pot systems have led to striking results on element
transport by mycorrhizal fungi (see for references Marschner 1995; Schweiger and
Jakobsen 2000), they presented some important drawbacks: (1) the presence of
undesirable micro-organisms which could influence element bio-availability or
H. Dupré de Boulois (*), L. Voets, and S. Declerck
Université catholique de Louvain, Unité de Microbiologie, Croix du Sud 3, 1348 Louvainla-Neuve,
Belgium
email: herve.dupre@uclouvain.be
A. Varma and A.C. Kharkwal (eds.), Symbiotic Fungi, Soil Biology 18, 101
DOI: 10.1007/978‐3‐540‐95894‐9_7, # Springer‐Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2009