Axenic VAM Culture with spores

[Heidi-Jayne Hawkins]

Greetings!

I am working with VAM inoculated plants under sterile conditions.  This
requires a sterile inoculum source - ie. spores.  I have been isolating
spores (by centrifugation on sucrose), harvesting (by Pasteur pipette
connected to a vacuum or not - under the disection microscope) and 
cleaning (by rolling over filter paper) and sterilising (by transferral
to sterilant in a cup sieve under a laminar flow hood) - all these
processes are very tedious and a lot of transferals means that spores
are lost.  

Can anyone with experience of spores advise any other methods or 
modifications of the methods above.  I would sincerely appreciate this
as each plant inoculated required 500 to 1000 spores; this involves 
thus for one experiment large amounts of soil filtrate!

Thanks.

Yours sincerely
Heidi

PS. Any mycorrhizal discussion groups out there on the net?  I have
been unsuccessful in finding any...