Geographical origin and species differentiation of Transylvanian cheese. Comparative study of isotopic and elemental profiling vs. DNA results

•Elemental and isotopic profile – tools for cheese differentiation.•Cheese differentiation with respect to animal species validated through DNA.•Mn and Rare Earth Elements content – discrimination markers for geographical origin.•Chemometric models for cheese differentiation. The present study proposed the cheese differentiation, according to geographical production area and with respect to species (cow, sheep) of two traditional cheese specialties, (salty and ripened), produced in Transylvania, Romania. For this purpose, the elemental profile and carbon isotopic ratios (13C/12C) of cheese and extracted casein were corroborated through statistic supervised techniques to get the best discrimination markers. The manganese content, along with Rare Earth Elements (REE) concentrations, proved to be very powerful predictors, for the traditional salted cheese mainly, due to the direct influence of the local salted water. Despite that proposed techniques are not acknowledged methods for species differentiation, this approach allowed a successful discrimination of the animal species that produced the raw materials for cheese manufacturing (milk). The results generated by the developed chemometric model, for species differentiation, were compared with those obtained using Isoelectric focusing (IEF) and DNA tests. The proposed association of isotopic and elemental markers allowed a differentiation better than 92% for geographical provenance, of each investigated cheese specialties while, for species discrimination (cow vs. sheep) a percentage of 100% was obtained.