Classification of organic and ordinary kiwifruit by chemometrics analysis of elemental fingerprint and stable isotopic ratios

Elemental fingerprint, stable isotopic analysis, and chemometrics were combined to identify organic kiwifruit from ordinarily cultivated kiwifruit. Samples of organic (n1 = 78) and ordinary kiwifruit (n2 = 85) were collected from neighboring areas. For elemental fingerprint, the contents of 15 elements in fresh fruits, including Al, Cr, Mg, Pb, Zn, Ca, Cu, Mn, Se, Cd, Fe, Na, Sr, Co, and K, were determined by inductively coupled plasma optical emission spectrometry (ICP-OES). Three stable isotopes, including delta C-13, delta N-15, and delta O-18, were analyzed using an isotope-ratio mass spectrometer (IRMS). Different classification methods including soft independent modeling of class analogy (SIMCA), partial least squares discriminant analysis (PLSDA), and least squares support vector machines (LS-SVM), were used to discriminate the organic and ordinary kiwifruits by fusion of elemental and stable isotopic. As a result, the sensitivity, specificity, and overall accuracy of SIMCA model were 0.885, 0.857, and 0.864, respectively. PLSDA and LS-SVM obtained 0.950 and 0.983 classification accuracy of organic and ordinary kiwifruits, respectively. It was demonstrated that elemental fingerprint and stable isotopic analysis would provide useful chemical information for the identification of organic fruits, and the capacity of these methods could be enhanced by chemometrics. Practical Application The classification of kiwifruit usually relies on the label assigned by the merchant, which is prone to deceive consumers. This research has developed an accurate and effective classification method based on stable isotopes and mineral elements for the identification of ordinary kiwifruit and organic kiwifruit, providing a tool for the quality monitoring of organic food.