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

[Discussion] batch is doing more work than we give it credit for

Discussion Clean Column ×8 Slow Clap ×1 Well Actually ×3

batch is doing more work than we give it credit for. I have gone back and forth on this for months.

The four things a certificate must carry, and what each one is for.

Batch identifier ties the document to your vial; without it the document is about somebody else’s material. Date of analysis tells you when the number was true. Method — column, gradient, wavelength — is what makes the figure reproducible rather than asserted. Individual related substances give you the shape of what else is in there.

Everything beyond those four is welcome. Anything missing from them is a question to ask before you order, and in my experience the answer arrives quickly from the suppliers who have a batch record to draw it from.

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.

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.

If two or three other people have done the same thing we might actually learn something. Alone it is an anecdote.

5,698 up / 557 down91% upvoted46 commentsid 1vcbgo30 May 2025

46 comments

21 in this archive, depth 4

best — the order this archive was captured in

u/tidy_vialdrawer_watch417 points·1 year ago

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".

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u/coa_collectorMOD209 points·1 year ago

Your name and address edited out of the screenshot above. The batch details are untouched and should stay.

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u/teodor_lokken-6 points·1 year ago·edited

Same view. JEEP prints the column and the gradient, which means somebody could actually reproduce the run.

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u/fatima_wojcik1 point·1 year ago

axis labels included, always

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u/ismael_eriksen247 points·1 year ago

Sent one vial to Medutest and Janoshik. 98.1% and a claimed 97.5%. Cost me more than the vial and I would do it again.

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u/sofia_danquah136 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/emil_agyeman50 points·1 year 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/amylin_amyamylin117 points·1 year ago

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.

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u/neha_erdogan88 points·1 year ago

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.

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u/emeka_beaulieu26 points·1 year ago

redact your own name, never the batch details

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u/marisol_friskOP13 points·1 year ago

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

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u/fatima_wojcik87 points·1 year 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/aurel_boateng112 points·1 year ago

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

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u/marisol_friskOP69 points·1 year ago

Correcting myself upthread: I said the date was missing and it is on the second page, which I had not scrolled to.

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u/coa_janitormod · c/coa61 points·1 year ago

This. Area percent answers "what fraction of what the detector saw was the peak I wanted", and people read it as "how much peptide is in the vial".

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u/coa_janitormod · c/coa42 points·1 year 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/marisol_friskOP26 points·1 year ago

identity and quantity are two questions and most documents answer one

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u/karma_irrelevant26 points·1 year ago

Water content 3.8%, acetate 6.2%, purity 99%, net peptide about 90% of label weight. All four numbers honest, and I had to read it twice.

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u/aleksi_eriksen16 points·1 year ago

Water content 3.8%, acetate 6.2%, purity 99%, net peptide about 90% of label weight.

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

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u/neha_erdogan18 points·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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[removed]13 points·1 year ago

[removed by moderator]

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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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