Geographical traceability of south-east Asian durian: a chemometric study using stable isotopes and elemental compositions

Abstract Determining the geographical origin of specialty fruits imported into China is important to protect the legitimate rights and interests of consumers against mislabeled origin fruits and may provide a regulatory tool to verify fruit sold into international markets. This study aims to establish an accurate and effective method to identify the geographical origin of south-east Asian durian, which could be further used to improve the traceability of similar imported fruits. In this study, 73 durian were collected from Malaysia, Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam. We analyzed durian core and pulp using five stable isotopes (δ15N, δ13C, δ34S, δ2H and δ18O) and elemental contents: nitrogen (% N), carbon (% C) and sulfur (% S). Two way-ANOVA (two-way analysis of variance) was used to identify major origin differences for each variable. Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA) and Artificial Neural Network (ANN) models were used as exploratory techniques and classification parametrics. Two way-ANOVA showed significant differences (p