Long pepper (Piper hispidinervum C. DC.) is a shrub of the Piperaceae family, native of the Amazonian region, with special interest of cosmetics and bio-insecticide industries due to its high concentration of safrol, an essential oil extracted from the leaves and stems. This work aimed to evaluate the physical and nutritional characteristics of the encapsulation matrix during the production of synthetic seeds of long pepper. Germinated long pepper seeds were used as vegetative material for encapsulation. For both experiments, the influence of capsule composition (water or MS) and consistency (sodium alginate at 1% or 2%), complexation time in CaCl2 (10, 20 and 30 minutes) and opening of the capsules were evaluated. After encapsulation, the materials were transferred to flasks with MS medium and maintained in a growth room, where the germination and growth rates of the encapsulated plantlets were evaluated every two weeks. We verified that the use of an artificial endosperm composed by 1% of sodium alginate in MS medium promoted the best results for the conversion and further growth of plants originated from synthetic seeds after 30 days of culture in solid MS medium, independently of the complexation time used.
Piper hispidinervum C. DC; artificial seeds; encapsulated units
