Almost every peptide site in Australia shows you a certificate. Very few show you one that describes the vial you are actually buying. Here is how to tell the difference in under two minutes.
A certificate of analysis is a claim about one specific batch of material made by one specific laboratory on one specific date. Strip away any of those three anchors and the document is decoration. Most certificates circulating in the Australian peptide market are missing at least one.
What each line on the certificate actually tells you
- Batch / lot ID — the only string that connects the paper to your vial. It must be printed on the vial too.
- HPLC purity — the percentage of total UV-absorbing area attributable to the main peak. It is a relative measure, not an absolute one.
- LC-MS or MALDI mass — confirms you have the right molecule. Purity without identity is worthless.
- Peptide content — net peptide as a share of vial mass, after counterion and water. Frequently omitted.
- Counterion — acetate or TFA. Affects both mass maths and downstream assay behaviour.
- Water content — Karl Fischer figure where available.
- Test date and testing laboratory — an unnamed lab is an untestable claim.
Six red flags
- The same certificate appears on multiple products with only the compound name changed.
- No lot ID, or a lot ID that does not appear anywhere on the physical vial.
- A purity figure quoted with no chromatogram attached.
- Purity above 99.9% on a long or difficult sequence — implausible, and a sign of a fabricated number.
- No testing laboratory named, or a laboratory that cannot be found to exist.
- A test date that predates the stated synthesis date.
Why HPLC alone is not enough
An HPLC trace can be clean while the molecule is entirely wrong. A single deletion or substitution often co-elutes with the target under a standard gradient. Mass spectrometry is what separates "one clean peak" from "one clean peak of the correct compound". Recovery Labs publishes both for every lot, because either one alone is a partial answer.
COA questions we get weekly
Is 98% purity acceptable for research material?
For many exploratory assays, yes. Recovery Labs sets its own release floor at 99% because batch-to-batch reproducibility improves materially at that threshold.
Should the certificate be from a third-party lab?
Independent third-party testing removes the obvious conflict of interest. Recovery Labs uses independent HPLC-MS testing and names the method on every published certificate.
Why does peptide content matter if purity is high?
Purity describes the composition of the peptide fraction. Content describes how much of the vial is peptide at all. A 99% pure vial can still be 12% counterion salt by mass.
