Accepted answer
96.4 per cent purity with no content figure leaves the milligram number unmeasured. Purity says 96.4 of every 100 units of detected area is cagrilintide and 3.6 is something else. Content says how many milligrams are in the glass. The two do not constrain each other: a vial can be 96.4 per cent pure and still be under label, because water and counter-ion are part of the gross mass and neither shows up as an impurity peak. If you buy one test, buy the one that changes your arithmetic.
Reporting threshold is convention and not chemistry, which is why two certificates with different thresholds disagree by a tenth of a point or more.
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.
Mass shifts and what they usually mean
| Δ mass (Da) | Most likely cause | Distinguishing feature |
|---|
| +1 | Deamidation (Asn or Gln) | New peak, slightly earlier retention |
| −17 | Loss of ammonia | Often with deamidation |
| −18 | Dehydration / succinimide | pH-dependent, reversible |
| +16 | Oxidation (Met, Trp) | Earlier retention, light-related |
| −128 | Missing Gln or Lys | Deletion sequence from synthesis |
| 0 | Isomer: racemisation or scrambling | Same mass, shifted retention |
It helps to be literal here: 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.
Published side-by-side method comparisons show that a two-point difference in purity on the same vial is easily explained by method choice alone.
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.
If you are ranking vendors, specify a method and have all samples tested at the same place.
edited 5 Jun 2026 by s_bhattacharya — clarified the distinction between purity and content