The techniques for in vitro cultivation of AM fungi on excised roots (Declerck, Fortin and Strullu, 2005) and on autotrophic plants, namely HAM-P and MD-P (Voets et al., 2005; Voets et al., 2009), are used since many years at the CEntre of Study on AM Mononexics (CESAMM) as useful tools to investigate plant-fungus associations.

These systems can be used for a wide array of research topics. Indeed, they offer unique advantages in genetics, cell biology, biodiversity and physiological investigations of AM fungi and their hosts. Non-destructive microscopic observations, reliable cell physiology studies, clean biochemical and molecular analyses, highly controlled interaction studies with other micro-organisms and the potential to develop reliable in vitro mycorrhization of micro-propagated plants at an industrial scale, are amongst the applications permitted by these techniques.