Uso da espectrometria no infravermelho próximo na avaliação da qualidade fisiológica de sementes de algodão

Abstract

Cotton is an important cropin national and international scale, demanding growing technification and technologies applied at the productive chain, looking for greater productivities, lower losses and increase of productquality. The seeds in this scenario is of great importance. To assess quality, seeds evaluations are made by several vigor tests, however the search for techniques and faster evaluation tools is recurrent. Near Infrared Reflectance (NIR) allied with chemometrics can offer an alternative to quality evaluation, because this tool has already been used successfully in many agriculture areas, including seeds area. The objective of this study was to evaluate the near infrared spectrometry potential in analyze the quality of cotton seeds regarding its vigor levels. Were used eight samples referring to eight lots of cotton seeds, with and without lint, with different physiological quality.To gauge the seeds physiological quality, has been made tests of germination, emergence, seedling speed emergence, tetrazolium, electrical conductivity and sanity. Those characteristics were compared with the spectra obtained by near infrared spectrometer for four sample preparation, intact seeds, split, without tegument and ground, using partial least squares-discriminant analysis (PLS-DA). The results show that is possible to predict different physiological quality of cotton seeds with satisfactory results and the bests models obtained was for ground seeds, with and without lint, presenting higher performance.