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

[Discussion] the purity advice in here is 3 years out of date

Discussion Clean Column ×6 Sourced ×2

the purity advice in here is 3 years out of date. It is the sort of thing everyone half-believes and nobody writes down.

Hard numbers: 3 years. Anything softer than that is flagged as an impression.

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.

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.

Research-use-only material is not approved for human use and nothing here should be read as a recommendation to use it.

2,196 up / 172 down93% upvoted36 commentsid zewvsu16 Mar 2025

36 comments

29 in this archive, depth 6

best — the order this archive was captured in

u/cormac_pereira291 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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[removed]206 points·1 year ago

[removed by moderator]

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u/purity_pedantanalytical87 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/step_therapy_s46 points·1 year ago

a certificate with no method line is decorative

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u/certified_referenceQC198 points·1 year ago

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.

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u/camila_lindqvist97 points·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/alcohol_aversion29 points·1 year ago

water content is on there and everyone skips it

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u/valeria_karlsenOP157 points·1 year ago

axis labels included, always

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u/clara_restrepo127 points·1 year ago

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

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u/dario_boateng72 points·1 year ago

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

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u/santiago_szabo28 points·1 year ago

batch number, date of analysis, method, individual impurities — that is the minimum set

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u/dead_space_doug279 points·1 year ago

Asked KP 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/hugo_bergstrom230 points·1 year 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/nadia_kjaer180 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/first_hundredMOD128 points·1 year ago·edited

Left up and flaired Explainer. This is the answer we keep linking, written properly.

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u/soren_nkemelu-38 points·1 year ago

the counterion is part of the mass you paid for

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u/meera_sandvik1 point·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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u/emil_agyeman61 points·1 year ago·edited

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/blunt_coldbox2954 points·1 year ago

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/milos_trevino16 points·1 year ago

redact your own name, never the batch details

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u/sofia_danquah32 points·1 year ago·edited

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/low_appetite_lisa11 points·1 year ago

post the whole document, not the headline number

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u/cato_achebe0 points·1 year ago

HPLC-UV and LC-MS answer different questions

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u/cato_achebe38 points·1 year ago

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.

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u/dario_vermeulen30 points·1 year ago·edited

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

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u/aleksi_eriksen8 points·1 year ago

ask for the storage condition the stability statement was written against

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u/blunt_coldbox2916 points·1 year ago

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

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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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