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c/coa·posted 3 months ago by u/bastian_aalto

[Question] certificate of analysis — what am I missing here

Question The Quiet One ×2 Receipts ×1

Slightly embarrassed to be asking this, but: certificate of analysis — what am I missing here.

Spent four months confusing area% and mass% in every post I made here. One explainer thread and it clicked permanently.

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.

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

If somebody has the same thing measured a different way, post it next to mine and we will see whether they agree.

7,812 up / 5,930 down57% upvoted52 commentsid zzz6w122 Apr 2026

52 comments

30 in this archive, depth 4

best — the order this archive was captured in

u/teodor_jansen190 points·3 months 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/bastian_aaltoOP278 points·3 months ago

Sent one vial to Janoshik and Medutest. 97.3% and a claimed 97.0%. Cost me more than the vial and I would do it again.

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u/dario_vermeulen187 points·3 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/bastian_aaltoOP94 points·3 months 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/dead_space_doug66 points·3 months ago·edited

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/bastian_aaltoOP-1 point·3 months ago

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

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u/marisol_frisk164 points·3 months 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/nadia_kjaer211 points·3 months ago

the lot on the vial has to match the lot on the page

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u/coa_janitormod · c/coa89 points·3 months ago

axis labels included, always

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u/zaid_balogun71 points·3 months ago

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

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u/yusuf_nakamura132 points·3 months ago

the lot on the vial has to match the lot on the page

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

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u/hugo_bergstrom111 points·3 months ago

Is water content on the document? It changes your concentration arithmetic.

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u/anya_correia72 points·3 months ago

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

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u/katrin_girard81 points·3 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/gallbladder_gary18 points·3 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/bastian_aalto40 points·3 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/chidi_demir15 points·3 months ago

ask for the storage condition the stability statement was written against

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u/stablecoin_steve53 points·3 months ago

a certificate with no method line is decorative

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u/andres_restrepo30 points·3 months 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/priya_palacios25 points·3 months ago

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

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[deleted]9 points·3 months ago

[deleted]

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u/sunday_shot_sal4 points·3 months 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/cato_achebe3 points·3 months ago

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

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u/kavya_verhoeven12 points·3 months ago

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

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u/wanjiru_varga8 points·3 months ago

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/vito_chowdhury8 points·3 months ago

chromatogram or it did not happen

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u/noor_cardoso15 points·3 months 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/nikhil_lindqvist5 points·3 months ago

post the whole document, not the headline number

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u/laila_yilmaz25 points·3 months ago·edited

Asked SSA 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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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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