In conducting a research on arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi, many times it is tempting to collect a large amount of extraradical mycelium from the mycorrhiza-inoculated root system or soil, but how quickly? And there is a certain amount required in quantity. Some may have used two-chamber root boxes, but they are just as tedious.
Is there any other way to collect a certain amount of extraradical mycelium directly in rhizosphere and the roots of inoculated plants?
Please let me know.
Thanks.
Science is never done easily and quickly. Separation/splitting of symbiotic organisms into individual components is a very challenging task, and usually cannot be done perfectly correctly because of tight interactions between symbionts. Splitting is incomplete and partially damaging. Moreover, results generated after such an imperfect procedure are typically rather modest and inconclusive. Why do you need the separation? What questions do you intend to answer? Perhaps there are other smarter solutions to answer science questions?
Nicolai S Panikov
Usually when we study mycorrhizae, we focus more on plants and less on symbiotic arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi. Therefore, I want to analyze the change of the two. However, how to quickly analyze the arbuscular mycorrhizal hyphae from mycorrhized roots to analyze nutrient changes and the expression of related genes is crucial to understand the two.
Qiang-Sheng Wu, it looks like you do not have specific questions that you intend to answer or hypotheses, which you plan to test experimentally. Believe me, there are thousands of papers and books focusing on mycorrhiza and even more publications on plants, as well as on their interactions. Thus I strongly disagree with your verdict 'we focus more on plants and less on fungi'. Who are 'we'? Perhaps, some botanical departments do ignore microbial symbionts, and this is fine for botanists. Next, what do you imply by 'focus'? My guess, you mean a descriptive study of various biological details. It is also fine but please be aware that modern science tends to be predictive (rather than descriptive), it deals with systems biology (rather than last century reductionistic biology looking to splitting systems to separate elements).
Nicolai S Panikov
Because I'm doing PUT genes in plants, I also want to detect the change in PUT genes from mycorrhizal fungi. I want to isolate more hyphae from the mycorrhized roots to extract the total RNA and clone the PUT gene.
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