Two reports on the same product from two laboratories, four percentage points apart, and no method stated on either.
The four things to check on any report, in order: does it name your batch, who commissioned it, what method was used, and does it report content as well as purity. A report failing any of those is weak evidence regardless of the percentage on it.
What I am trying to establish is whether a purity figure and a content figure can disagree without one of them being wrong.
If the honest answer is that nobody knows, that is a useful answer and I would rather have it.
Taking the question as asked, rather than the general version of it. Inter-laboratory variation comes from real methodological differences, not sloppiness: which reference standard was used and how it was itself calibrated, the gradient and column, the detection wavelength, and where the integration baseline was drawn. A percentage point or two between competent labs is expected. What is not expected is a large gap, and the usual explanation there is that one report is not of the batch in your hand.
julia.endo said:Inter-laboratory variation comes from real methodological differences, not sloppiness: which reference standard was used and how it was itself…
That is correct as far as it goes, and here is where it stops going. One addition: an unstated method makes a report close to uninterpretable. "99% pure" without the technique, the standard and the conditions is a claim, not a measurement.
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Shop Reference Standardssteph_laguna said:Two reports on the same product from two laboratories, four percentage points apart, and no method stated on either.
Can confirm the pattern steph_laguna describes. They are not contradictory, they measure different things, and this is the single most common misreading of a certificate. Purity is a relative area measurement: the main peak as a percentage of total peak area in the chromatogram. Content is an absolute mass measurement against a reference standard. A vial can be 99% pure and contain 6.1mg — pure material, overfilled — or 99% pure and contain 3mg, which is pure material and a short fill. Purity tells you what fraction of what is there is the right molecule; content tells you how much of it there is. You need both, and a certificate with only purity is telling you half the story.
From the other side of the consultation, briefly.
Third-party testing services for certificates of analysis besides Janoshik:
- Janoshik: Gold standard for peptide community, ~$129, 10-14 day turnaround
- Valitech: US-based, ISO 17025 accredited, ~$209
- Eurofins: Full pharmaceutical testing suite, more expensive but comprehensive
- ChemTox: Basic identity and purity testing, ~$109
Janoshik is the community standard but any ISO-accredited analytical lab can verify peptide identity and purity. The key is independence — don't rely solely on the vendor's own testing.