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c/coa·posted 2 months ago by u/first_hundred

[PSA] certificate of analysis is not what most of this community thinks it is

COA Receipts ×8

certificate of analysis is not what most of this community thinks it is. Two minutes of reading now saves an argument later.

My first certificate had a compound name, a percentage and a logo. I thought that was normal. It is not, and now I know what to ask for.

How to ask for a batch record without it turning into a negotiation.

One email, three requests: the batch-specific certificate for lot X, the method line behind it, and the storage condition the stability statement was written against. No preamble, no explanation of why you want it.

What comes back is the signal. A full document with the column and gradient printed on it, inside a day, tells you there is a real quality system behind the operation. That is the test I run before I order from anyone new, and it costs nothing.

Why the same vial can honestly produce three different numbers.

Purity by area percent is relative to what the detector saw on one gradient at one wavelength. Net peptide content subtracts counterion, water and residual solvent. Mass of peptide per vial is net content times fill weight, and fill weight has its own tolerance.

So a document reading 99% purity, 6% acetate and 4% water is describing a vial that is about 90% peptide by mass, and every one of those numbers is honest. The mistake is treating the headline figure as the answer to "how much peptide did I get".

Would rather be corrected in public than confident in private.

538 up / 201 down73% upvoted23 commentsid 113xln11 May 2026

23 comments

14 in this archive, depth 5

best — the order this archive was captured in

u/camila_lindqvist52 points·2 months ago

The PDF creation date being later than the analysis date is usually a re-issue or a re-export. It is worth one question and it is not evidence of anything on its own.

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u/anders_kuusela40 points·2 months ago

I would not read a rounded figure as evasive. Plenty of documents round to one decimal as house style.

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u/dead_space_doug14 points·2 months ago

Yes — and the reason to ask for the whole page is that the interesting parts are the ones people crop out to fit a screenshot.

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u/rohan_steiner12 points·2 months ago

Right, and net peptide content is where the counterion and the water go. Both numbers can be honest and very different.

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u/first_hundredOP7 points·2 months ago·edited

Does the lot on the vial match the lot on the page?

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u/cormac_pereira13 points·2 months ago

Not quite. Two labs with different gradients can resolve a close-eluting impurity differently and both be reporting honestly.

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u/coa_janitorMOD52 points·2 months ago

Reminder: a question about a document is not an accusation about a supplier, and posts that blur the two get retitled.

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u/meera_sandvik73 points·2 months ago

Did you ask for the batch-specific document, or is this the catalogue one?

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u/freya_baptista19 points·2 months ago

Batch number and date of analysis, are both on there?

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[deleted]13 points·2 months ago

[deleted]

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u/aleksi_eriksen19 points·2 months ago

Pushing back a little: a missing field is usually presentation, not concealment. Ask for the full document before drawing conclusions.

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u/neha_erdogan28 points·2 months ago

What does the method line actually say? Not the technique — the column and the gradient.

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u/cato_achebe14 points·2 months ago

Disagree that a lower number is automatically worse. A conservative claim that survives testing is worth more than an optimistic one that does not.

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u/low_appetite_lisa23 points·2 months ago

Careful — "the metadata looks odd" is a reason to ask a question, not a conclusion. Re-issues are ordinary.

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About c/coa

How to read a certificate of analysis and what it does and does not tell you. Area% versus mass%, identity versus quantity, water content, related substances, acetate counterions, and the difference between a vendor-supplied COA and an independent test on the vial you actually received.

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  1. Post the full document. Cropped COAs that hide the batch number or date get removed.
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