COA vs SDS vs Specification Sheet: The Documents Behind a Research Peptide

COA vs SDS vs spec sheet: three documents, three questions

Ask two things of each document: which question it answers, and whether it describes the product in general or one particular lot.

Two of the three describe a product; only one describes a lot. An SDS does not go out of date because the lot number changed, and a certificate does not transfer to a new vial because the product name matches.

The safety data sheet: hazard communication under WHMIS 2015

The Canadian Centre for Occupational Health and Safety (CCOHS) describes safety data sheets as “summary documents that provide information about the hazards of a product”, with more detail than the label. The rules sit in the federal Hazardous Products Act and the Hazardous Products Regulations, which took effect on February 11, 2015, replaced the Controlled Products Regulations and aligned WHMIS with the Globally Harmonized System (GHS). Amendments in force since December 15, 2022 track the GHS’s seventh revised edition and parts of the eighth; Health Canada says they “provided a 3-year transition period that ended on December 14, 2025”.

The obligation follows a classification, not a type of product. Under the Act, a hazardous product is anything “classified in accordance with the regulations” in a hazard class, and section 13 bars a supplier — a person who, “in the course of business, sells or imports a hazardous product” — from selling one for workplace use without a compliant SDS, provided to the purchaser. Whether a given research compound meets any hazard-class criteria is a classification question for its supplier; this article makes no claim either way about any peptide.

What the 16 sections contain

Section 4 of the regulations requires every Schedule 1 heading, numbered and in order. Where a required item is unavailable or does not apply, “an indication to that effect must be clearly stated”, and the product and supplier identifiers “must be identical to those provided on the label”, so section 1 is where you confirm you have the right sheet.

For a dry research powder, sections 2 and 6 to 11 carry most of the practical information, and section 16 dates the sheet. The bench side — weighing, static, spills, labels and waste — is in our companion guide to handling peptide powders safely under WHMIS.

Supplier duties and employer duties

Supplier duties are federal. The SDS “must be provided by the suppliers of the hazardous products at the time of sale”, CCOHS notes, in English and French — one bilingual sheet or two unilingual parts (section 6.2) — and a website address alone does not meet the duty. Suppliers no longer have to renew an SDS every three years. Instead, section 5.12 gives them 90 days from the date significant new data become available — data that change the classification or the ways to protect against the hazard — to bring the SDS up to date, and buyers in that window must be given a document setting out the required changes and that date. Section 5.11 spares a supplier from re-sending an SDS to a buyer who already holds a current one for the same product identifier: the sheet belongs to the product, not the lot.

Employer duties sit in provincial and territorial health and safety law, or the Canada Labour Code and Part X of the Canada Occupational Health and Safety Regulations in federal workplaces. Hazardous products must arrive with an up-to-date SDS, kept “readily available to the workers who are exposed”; Ontario’s guide reads that as close to the workers and accessible during every shift, on paper or electronically. CCOHS notes that employers in federally regulated workplaces, British Columbia, Saskatchewan, Newfoundland and Labrador, the Northwest Territories, Nova Scotia, Nunavut and Yukon must still actively seek an updated SDS every three years. Laboratory exemptions are narrow. A “laboratory sample” is material in a container of less than 10 kg intended solely to be tested in a laboratory, not material the laboratory uses to test other things or for teaching, and its reduced label and SDS rules apply only in limited cases, such as a sample of unknown composition handed over for testing without a sale (section 5). As Ontario’s guide notes, WHMIS 2015 also eliminated the old exemptions for products from a laboratory supply house.

The specification sheet: what the product should be

ICH Q6A, a drug guideline, defines a specification as “a list of tests, references to analytical procedures, and appropriate acceptance criteria”, and conformance as meeting those criteria when tested by the listed procedures; ICH Q7 opens its own definition with the same words. Quoting pharmaceutical frameworks makes no claim about which rules apply to a laboratory reagent. Q6A’s universal tests are description, identification, assay and impurities. For a synthetic peptide those might become an appearance statement, a mass spectrometry identity test, an HPLC purity criterion and a content figure, and Q6A says its approach may apply to “synthetic peptides of low molecular weight” but is not sufficient for larger peptides and polypeptides.

Commercially, the document may be called a specification sheet, a product data sheet or a technical data sheet. We found no Canadian rule that fixes its contents, so read the content, not the title, and separate acceptance criteria, which each lot is tested against, from “typical” values, which commit to nothing about your lot. Recommended storage conditions on a product sheet concern stability, a different question from the safe storage covered in section 7 of an SDS. What a specification cannot do is report anything: Q6A calls specifications “one part of a total control strategy”. A specification sets the pass mark without showing that any lot sat the test.

The certificate of analysis: what one lot measured

A certificate of analysis is the measurement set against the specification, and the only one of the three documents tied to a single lot. ICH Q7, the GMP guide for active pharmaceutical ingredients, says certificates “should be issued for each batch” on request, giving the batch number, the date of release and each test with “the acceptance limits, and the numerical results obtained”, dated and signed by authorized quality-unit personnel; a new certificate issued by or for an agent or broker should name the laboratory that did the analysis, refer to the original manufacturer and attach a copy of the original batch certificate. ISO/IEC 17025:2017 requires accredited reports to state that the results relate only to the items tested — they “cannot be extended to other items”, as European Accreditation puts it. That makes the SDS vs COA difference plain: a certificate is evidence about a tested sample with no hazard information, and an SDS is hazard information with no evidence about any sample. Our guide on how to read a certificate of analysis covers the rest line by line.

What none of the three can prove

Some things sit outside all three, however accurate they are.

• Suitability beyond the bench. None of the three is evidence that a material is safe or suitable for human or animal use.
• The absence of a hazard. Classification works from available data, and missing data must be declared rather than filled in. A barely studied compound can carry a sheet full of “no data available”, or no classification at all, and neither is reassuring.
• What happened after dispatch. A certificate describes the sample on the day it was tested; transit and storage are outside every document in the set.
• Their own accuracy. Documents can be out of date, mismatched or wrong. Check that the identifiers on the SDS and the label match, that the revision date is current, and that the certificate’s lot number matches the vial.

How to file the three documents in a lab

Different scopes mean different places, linked by the lot number.

• Specification and certificate go with the lot, beside the supplier’s lot number and your own receiving number. Our guide to lot numbers shows how to match documents to a lot number.
• The SDS goes where workers can reach it on every shift. Note the section 16 revision date, and file superseded sheets with the date they were replaced.
• The inventory ties them together. CCOHS recommends that laboratories keep an up-to-date chemical inventory and review each SDS. Link both records from the inventory entry, and check all three documents at receipt rather than after an incident.

What’s established and what isn’t

Asking a Canadian supplier for documents

A specific request gets better answers than “send me your paperwork”. Four questions cover most of it.

• Is the product classified as a hazardous product under the Hazardous Products Regulations? If so, the current SDS should be bilingual and dated in section 16; if not, ask what the classification was based on.
• Which specification is the certificate measured against, and which version?
• Does the certificate carry the lot number on my vial? If not, it describes other material.
• Has anything changed since my last order? A revised SDS, a new specification version and a new lot can all arrive with a repeat purchase.

If your institution wants documentation on file before a product enters its chemical inventory, ask your environmental health and safety office what it needs before ordering. Pure Peptides Canada is itself a supplier, so apply the same questions to us. Start with the Lab Testing page; to ask for an SDS, a specification or any other product document, use our contact page.

See a certificate of analysis for yourself

Janoshik test reports for the research peptides below are listed on our Lab Testing page. Read one with this guide in hand: check what was tested and by whom, and whether its batch number matches your vial.

BPC-15715-amino-acid research peptideView product TB-500Thymosin beta-4 research peptideView product GHK-CuCopper tripeptideView product EpithalonLyophilized tetrapeptideView product

Frequently asked questions