Multi-stable isotope and multi-element origin traceability of rice from the main producing regions in Asia: A long-term investigation during 2017-2020

Stable isotope and multi-element analytical techniques with chemometrics were developed to trace the origin authenticity of rice in China market. In the long-term study from 2017 to 2020, a total of 115 batches of rice samples from 8 main producing areas of 7 Asian countries were determined 5 stable isotope ratios and 18 elemental contents. One-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) and various multivariate modeling methods were performed for the origin discrimination. Supervised multivariate modeling including partial least squares discriminant analysis (PLS-DA) and linear discriminant analysis (LDA) can realize more satisfactory identifica-tion of 8 rice origins than ANOVA comparison and unsupervised methods, their leave-one-out cross-validation accuracies approach 85.0 % and 90.9 %, respectively. delta 2H, delta 13C, Ba, Al, Mg, delta 34S, Pb and delta 18O were screened as the most important variables for rice origin traceability (VIP > 1 or AUC > 0.5). This analytical strategy combining maybe promising to ensure the origin authenticity and combat illegal mislabeling in rice trade.