Accepted answer
High-performance liquid chromatography is a separation technique, not an identification technique, and it answers the question "how much of the detected signal is a single species" not "which species is it."
Wider-pore phases — 300 Angstrom rather than 100 Angstrom — have faster mass transfer and narrower peaks for peptides above three kilodaltons, which is almost every peptide you will see.
Detector linearity is why a heavily loaded peak can give false purity by compressing the main peak height while leaving impurity shoulders unchanged.
Peptide separation by reverse-phase high-performance liquid chromatography is described in the general chapters of the United States Pharmacopeia, European Pharmacopeia and Japanese Pharmacopeia, and the methods converge on essentially the same principles.
The caveat is that HPLC is a purity technique and says almost nothing about whether the main peak is actually your target compound — that is why identity confirmation from mass spectrometry or peptide mapping matters.
The practical summary: specify the method, run the same method on every sample you compare, and use orthogonal techniques to confirm the result.
edited 13 Jun 2026 by helena_vidmar — fixed an arithmetic slip in the third paragraph
2For what it is worth, my own result was within half a per cent of this. – Dr_Lena_Ostrowska 9 months ago add a comment