Geographical origin identification of cinnamon using HPLC-DAD fingerprints and chemometrics

The commercial value of cinnamon depends largely on its geographical origin. This study proposed high-performance liquid chromatography-diode array detection (HPLC-DAD) fingerprints combined with chemometrics to identify geographical origins of cinnamons. Alternating trilinear decomposition (ATLD) algorithm was applied to extract meaningful chemical information from the HPLC fingerprint data. Then, non-targeted HPLC fingerprints and chemical component information were used as chemical descriptors to distinguish geographical origins using principal component analysis (PCA) and partial least squares-discriminant analysis (PLS-DA)/N-way partial least squares-discriminant analysis (NPLS-DA). Satisfactory classification results were acquired for each discriminant model and the correct classification rates (CCRs) of training and test sets were 100%. Moreover, four characteristic variables were screened by variable importance in projection (VIP) method, three of which were reasonably identified as cinnamic acid, cinnamaldehyde and 2-methoxycinnamaldehyde, which can be regarded as potential markers to distinguish cinnamon from different geographical origins. The results indicated that HPLC-DAD fingerprints combined with chemometrics can be a promising means to identify the geographical origins and screen potential markers of cinnamon samples, especially in the absence of high-cost and sophisticated analytical instrumentals (e.g., high-resolution mass spectrometry and nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy). This work can help to prevent cinnamon fraud practices and maintain the normal order of the cinnamon market.