Abstract:Fatty acids (FAs) composition pattern, i.e. FAs fingerprints, of milk and dairy products is not only determined or affected by milk animal's species and breeds, natural geographical and climate environmental origin, also correlated to feeding pattern of milk animal, quality of raw milk, product type, product standard and processing parameters, etc., artificial and industrial factors. To date, the concept of "industrial fingerprint" of dairy products has not been proposed, and lacks systematic studies. A total of 200 Holstein cow (cow), Yak and Goat raw milk, Ultra high temperature (UHT) milk and milk powder samples were collected, and FAs were detected by gas chromatography method. According to the following five categories/aspects of industrial factors such as ①product type, ②UHT treatment, ③producer/brand, ④liquid milk series, and ⑤feeding pattern of cow, significant of differences of each single FA and overall differences of FAs data set were tested and compared, and principal component analysis(PCA) was conducted to observe the natural clustering of sample sets by their FAs fingerprints. As the results, most FA showed significant differences in each study aspects, but no significant differences were observed on general mean of overall FAs by block designed analysis on variance and paired t test, traditional statistics could not distinguish the complex overall changes of FAs pattern. PCA showed that the natural clustering of milk samples were consistent with processing methods, brands, series, and feeding patterns, proving that these various industrial factors could cause characteristic and patterned changes on FAs fingerprints of dairy products. Conversely, it is feasible and promising to establish FAs fingerprint model to distinguish the producing and processing methods, producer and brand of milk products, product series and so on, integrity and authenticity of market dairy foods, and also facilitate and visualize massive data/multivariate evaluation on effectiveness of scientific feeding on milk animals and functional and peculiar dairy product development.