Germination and early seedling growth of cocoa with and without seed coat in two cultivars

The objective of the research was to evaluate the germination and early growth of the clonal varieties CCN51 and PS1319 of cocoa under the influence of the presence or absence of seed coat. For this purpose, the experiment was conducted at the State University of Londrina (UEL), using a completely randomized design in a 2 x 2 factorial scheme, with two genotypes (CCN51 and PS1319) and two seed coat conditions (with and without seed coat). Data were subjected to ANOVA, adopting a significance level of 5% (p ≤ 0.05). The variables analyzed were germination percentage, plant height, hypocotyl length, epicotyl length, seedling height, and number of leaves. The removal of the seed coat increased final germination percentage at 30 days in both genotypes, with both genotypes achieving total germination in the absence of the coat. For the other variables, in CCN51, seed coat removal resulted in better performance in height, epicotyl, and number of leaves. In contrast, PS1319 showed superior results in all variables when the seed remained intact. Thus, seed coat extraction may or may not be beneficial, depending on the clonal variety. The analysis of variance indicated a significant effect of genotype for all morphological variables evaluated, demonstrating that the early growth of cocoa seedlings is conditioned by genetic constitution. Therefore, it is concluded that seed coat removal has a positive effect on the germination percentage at 30 days of cocoa seed germination, but in the early development of seedlings, the influence of seed coat removal depends on the clonal variety used.