How do I reconcile 97.9% from Medutest with 95.2% from the supplier?

Stated plainly: 97.9% · Medutest · 95.2%.

I noticed this today and I have not touched anything since, in case the state is diagnostic.

I have not discarded anything yet, so a test is still possible if that is the recommendation.

Should I be treating this as a failure or as noise?

The honest answer is that the achievable range of plausible purity figures for a given vial is wider than most people expect.

Gradient slope controls resolution, and gentler slopes resolve co-eluting impurities into separate peaks — so the better method reports the worse purity number.

In practice, integration of the shoulder — whether you use perpendicular drop or tangent skim — determines what area gets assigned to the main peak versus the impurity table.

Proline conformer interconversion kinetics are well-characterised and the half-life is of the same order as the chromatographic peak width at room temperature.

The practical summary: ask for the chromatogram and the method, and ignore the headline number until you have both.

The single most important distinction is between what purity measures — the fraction of detected material that is your target — and what you actually want to know — how much of the material in the vial is your target.

Temperature affects the dynamics of molecular conformation, and if a peptide has proline residues that interconvert on the chromatographic timescale, the peak will split or shoulder at low temperature and collapse at high temperature.

Retention time is sequence-specific and method-specific, so comparing your result to a supplier value using a different method is meaningless without method documentation.

The Arrhenius relationship for peptide degradation is the basis of accelerated stability testing and also governs how quickly methods drift with temperature.

One qualification: achieving purity above roughly 98 per cent on a 30-residue peptide is fighting the chemistry of synthesis, not the quality of the purification.

Compare purity within a single laboratory on the same method, never across laboratories.

The method matters more than the vial, which is why specifying a method buys you far more than changing suppliers does.

Buffer versus acid in the mobile phase changes the ionisation state of basic and acidic residues, shifting retention and selectivity — same vial, potentially different separation.

Inter-laboratory studies on identical peptide material routinely find half-a-per-cent to a full-per-cent spreads in reported purity on the same sample.

The limitation is that single-digit micro-impurities become invisible at typical reporting thresholds, so "no impurities detected" means "none above one in two thousand."

If you only pay for one test, pay for quantified content. Purity is the number everyone quotes and content is the number that changes what you do.