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

•Isotopes are used to identify the origin of south-east Asian durian.•Four south-east Asian countries which supply durian to China were investigated.•Durian core had a higher traceability accuracy than durian pulp.•Higher origin recognition and predictive ability were achieved using LDA. 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 < 0.05) between the geographical origin and durian tissue type. The durian core afforded better origin traceability than durian pulp. LDA achieved durian origin accuracy rates of 98.6 % and 97.3 % for the testing and training sets respectively by combining stable isotopes and elemental contents. ANN gave higher accuracy rates than LDA, correctly identifying durian origin with an accuracy of 100 % for the training set, and 94.4 % on the testing set. This research found stable isotopes and elemental compositions could be used to potentially discriminate the geographical origins of durian from four south-east Asian countries.