Melon (Cucumis melo L.) fruit show a high diversity of postharvest physiological behavior, including climacteric and non-climacteric genotypes with distinct aroma profiles. The inside needle dynamic extraction (INDEX) technology to extract headspace of juice aroma volatiles coupled with aroma fingerprinting by electronic nose was used to discriminate the climacteric near-isogenic line (NIL) SC3-5-1, the non-climacteric NILs SC7-2 and SC10-2, and parents by their aroma characteristics ions. The NILs proceeded from non-climacteric parents: the Korean cultivar ‘Shongwan Charmi’ accession PI 161375 (SC) and the cultivar ‘T111’, a Piel de Sapo type (PS). The INDEX technique allowed the pre-concentration of aroma volatiles before fingerprint analysis using adequate adsorbents. The contents were finally desorbed and ions and molecular fragments detected by an electronic nose; and mass-to-charge ratio quantified. Several unsupervised and supervised multivariate statistical techniques, such as principal component analysis (PCA) or random forest (RF), were used to identify the most discriminant ions associated with physiological behavior. PCA separated the climacteric NIL SC3-5-1 from their non-climacteric parents, but did not allow a clear differentiation of non-climacteric NILs from PS. The discriminant ions for the classification by physiological behavior obtained using RF corresponded to type aldehydes, sulfurs, esters and ketone compounds. INDEX method coupled with electronic nose was a good tool to classify melon fruit samples of NILs regarding their aromatic volatile potenti
