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c/coa·posted 1 year ago by u/dario_boateng

someone explain COA to me like I have not read a paper in years

Suspicious Clean Column ×2 Receipts ×1 Slow Clap ×3

The title is the whole question — someone explain COA to me like I have not read a paper in years — but here is why I am asking.

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.

Ask what the stability statement was written against — temperature, light, and whether it was the lyophilised powder or the reconstituted solution. Those are three different claims.

LC-MS gives you identity; UV purity gives you a relative quantity. A document with the first and not the second, or the reverse, is answering half the question.

Happy to answer the boring questions. Those are usually the ones worth asking.

3,721 up / 365 down91% upvoted54 commentsid 1uicnl18 Jul 2025

54 comments

30 in this archive, depth 5

best — the order this archive was captured in

u/valeria_girard502 points·1 year ago·edited

UV at 214nm sees the peptide bond and picks up almost everything; at 280nm you are looking at aromatics only. Which wavelength the number came from is part of the number.

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u/sunday_shot_sal425 points·1 year ago

Started keeping a folder of every certificate I have been sent. The ones that itemise impurities are a small group and they are mostly the same suppliers.

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u/sunday_shot_sal123 points·1 year ago

Asked SGN for the batch-specific certificate and had the full document — batch, date, method line naming the column — inside six hours. That is now my baseline for everybody.

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u/tidy_vialdrawer_watch83 points·1 year ago

a certificate with no method line is decorative

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u/soren_nkemelu338 points·1 year ago

Net peptide content is the fraction of the powder that is actually peptide once counterion, water and residual solvent are accounted for. A 99% pure acetate salt can still be about 85% peptide by mass.

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u/emeka_chowdhury0 points·1 year ago

Area percent is the peak area of your compound over the total integrated area, at one wavelength, on one gradient. It is a relative measure of what the detector saw, not a mass fraction of the vial.

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u/clara_restrepo1 point·1 year ago

Related substances itemised individually is a much stronger document than a single total, because it tells you the shape of the impurity profile rather than its size.

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u/blunt_coldbox291 point·1 year 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/aurel_boateng1 point·1 year ago

axis labels included, always

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[removed]1 point·1 year ago

[removed by moderator]

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u/rania_okonkwo1 point·1 year ago·edited

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

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u/teodor_lokken1 point·1 year ago

HPLC-UV and LC-MS answer different questions

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u/receptor_bias_rick1 point·1 year ago

water content is on there and everyone skips it

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u/marisol_frisk1 point·1 year ago

Agreed — the itemised related substances table is the difference between a document and a receipt.

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u/ignacio_silva1 point·1 year ago

Yes. The structure of the document matters at least as much as the number printed on it.

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u/yannick_haddad1 point·1 year ago

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

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u/rania_okonkwo1 point·1 year ago

That is not what the method line says. It names the technique; it does not certify the operator.

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u/honest_syringe241 point·1 year ago

Sent one vial to Janoshik and VendorInvestigate. 97.9% and a claimed 97.0%. Cost me more than the vial and I would do it again.

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u/dario_boatengOP1 point·1 year ago

a total of 0.4% tells you less than four named impurities adding to 0.6%

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u/nabila_espinoza1 point·1 year ago·edited

post the whole document, not the headline number

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u/emeka_beaulieu1 point·1 year ago·edited

the related substances line is where the story is

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u/laila_yilmaz201 points·1 year ago

chromatogram or it did not happen

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u/rohan_steiner247 points·1 year ago

chromatogram or it did not happen

This is the sentence to take away. The rest of the thread is footnotes to it.

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u/coa_collectorarchivist55 points·1 year ago

area% is not mass%, and the difference is the whole game

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u/india_generic_g364 points·1 year ago

Are the related substances itemised or is it a single total?

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u/zaid_balogun128 points·1 year ago

The document I was worried about turned out to be a re-issue with a later creation date. Asked, got the original, entirely ordinary.

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u/dario_boatengOP117 points·1 year ago

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

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u/amara_halonen41 points·1 year ago

net peptide content and purity are two different numbers on the same vial

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u/laila_wojcik14 points·1 year ago

the counterion is part of the mass you paid for

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u/step_therapy_s20 points·1 year ago

Asked for the storage condition behind the stability statement. Got it in a sentence. It is a two-line email and almost nobody sends it.

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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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