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c/coa·posted 2 years ago by u/emil_agyeman

how much of what we believe about COA actually comes from area percent threads

Suspicious Clean Column ×7 Long Haul ×3

Genuine question, and the title is the question: how much of what we believe about COA actually comes from area percent threads.

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.

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.

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.

Would rather be corrected in public than confident in private.

2,598 up / 828 down76% upvoted58 commentsid 1wdrui12 Apr 2024

58 comments

30 in this archive, depth 5

best — the order this archive was captured in

u/ghrp_history360 points·2 years ago

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.

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u/tove_ogunleye84 points·2 years ago·edited

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

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u/noor_cardoso66 points·2 years 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/teodor_jansen27 points·2 years ago

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

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u/emil_agyeman430 points·2 years 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/rania_okonkwo84 points·2 years 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/amara_halonen161 points·2 years ago

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

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u/cormac_pereira123 points·2 years 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/first_hundredMOD71 points·2 years ago

Removed — cropped document. Post the whole page or do not post it; the fields people crop are the fields that matter.

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u/noor_cardoso101 points·2 years ago·edited

Small fix — 214nm, not 280nm. It matters here because the impurity you are asking about barely absorbs at the longer wavelength.

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u/wanjiru_varga84 points·2 years ago

Correction: that is net peptide content, not purity. Different number, different meaning, and the document says so if you read the row label.

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u/dario_boateng92 points·2 years 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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[removed]37 points·2 years ago

[removed by moderator]

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u/emil_agyemanOP14 points·2 years ago

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

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u/emil_agyemanOP5 points·2 years 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/hugo_bergstrom4 points·2 years 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/emeka_chowdhury47 points·2 years ago

identity and quantity are two questions and most documents answer one

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u/cesar_ivaturi29 points·2 years ago

That is the catalogue certificate rather than the batch-specific one. Same layout, completely different status.

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u/liv_nkemelu16 points·2 years 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/emeka_beaulieu87 points·2 years ago

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

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u/zeynep_zielinski49 points·2 years ago

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

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u/emil_agyemanOP35 points·2 years ago

Did you get the chromatogram or only the summary line?

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u/aurel_boateng30 points·2 years ago

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

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u/emil_agyeman37 points·2 years ago·edited

Sent one vial to Janoshik and Medutest.

aurel_boateng has the distinction right — one is a fraction of the detector signal, the other is a fraction of the mass.

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u/fatima_wojcik24 points·2 years 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/aurel_boateng18 points·2 years ago·edited

Agreed on asking for the storage condition. It is one line and it changes how you read the entire stability claim.

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u/zeynep_zielinski8 points·2 years ago

the counterion is part of the mass you paid for

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u/rohan_steiner4 points·2 years ago

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

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u/bastian_moreau5 points·2 years ago

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

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u/nadia_kjaer20 points·2 years ago

Cosigning. The batch identifier is load-bearing, and a certificate that cannot be tied to the vial in your hand is not about your vial.

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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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