Is a 96.4% result from Janoshik comparable to 98.8% from Medutest?

Numbers first: 96.4% · Janoshik · 98.8% · Medutest.

I have used one of these for a while and I am considering switching, which requires a reason.

What I care about is reproducibility, because a result I cannot repeat is not useful to me.

What does each option buy me, and what does it cost me?

In practice, start from what the detector sees, because that tells you what the number means.

Detection wavelength matters because 214 nm sees the peptide backbone while 280 nm sees only aromatic side chains — so truncation impurities lacking a tryptophan are invisible at 280 nm.

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.

The ICH Q3A impurity thresholds and the relevant pharmacopoeial chapters all specify method validation requirements that almost no research-grade certificate claims to meet.

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."

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

edited 13 Jul 2025 by ellis_thorne — removed a claim I could not source

Concretely, 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.

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 part that matters: mass on column affects detector linearity and peak overlap — overloading broadens peaks and hides neighbours, while underloading improves resolution but loses sensitivity.

I would be careful about over-reading a single measurement — treat it as a data point, not as ground truth.

If you are ranking vendors, specify a method and have all samples tested at the same place.

Reporting threshold is convention and not chemistry, which is why two certificates with different thresholds disagree by a tenth of a point or more.

Mobile phase additive choice affects ionisation and peak shape — TFA gives sharp peaks but suppresses mass spectrometry signal, formic acid gives worse peaks but preserves signal.

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.

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

Understanding purity requires separating the chemistry from the method from the reporting convention, and the three are not independent.

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.

Worth noting that method standardisation is poor in the research-grade space compared to pharmaceutical work, so identical-looking methods can produce different results.

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