Talk:Sodium laurilsulfate

This is just a synonym for sodium lauryl sulfate

See [1] for example. Yes, there is some ambiguity because the name may refer to a pure chemical compound or to the actual ingredient used by industry, but in my opinion this does not justify having separate articles. --Itub (talk) 02:47, 2 July 2009 (UTC)

The European Pharmacopoeia defines sodium laurilsulfate as a mixture of alkyl sulfates, so it cannot be considered a synonym since this would mean they are exactly the same. Do you know what the USP has to say about this matter? We could discuss about putting the two in one article, but it would have to be made clear that there is a (slight) chemical difference between laurilsulfate and lauryl sulfate. --ἀνυπόδητος (talk) 08:51, 2 July 2009 (UTC)

The way I see it they are just alternate spellings. The pharmacopoeia you cite never uses the spelling sodium lauryl sulfate, so you can't use it to show that whether they intended to define a different substance just by changing the spelling, or it was just a trivial variation in spelling. It's like using as a source an article on aluminium that has a different description of the substance than an article on aluminum and then wanting to create two separate articles.

The international pharmacopoeia shows them as synonyms: [2]

One could still use these pharmacopoeias to argue that SDS (however it is spelled) is not the same as sodium dodecyl sulfate, a pure substance described by a systematic name. That may be true, but I still think that the best way to cover the topic in Wikipedia is in one article (currently sodium lauryl sulfate is the more developed one), with a subsection describing the composition of the ingredient as defined by pharmacopoeias. Otherwise there will be overlap and confusion about what should go in each article because sodium lauryl sulfate and sodium dodecyl sulfate have very similar properties, which is to be expected when one is the major component of the other. --Itub (talk) 12:00, 2 July 2009 (UTC)

Hm. Up till now, I've only known the term "lauryl-" as trivial synonym for "dodecyl-" (and WP seems to agree -- see Dodecanol), so I concluded that lauryl sulfate = dodecyl sulfate, but laurilsulfate = the mixture. I was obviously mistaken here. I agree that the composition/naming confusion could be better explained if we have a single article. Go ahead with merging if you like! Cheers --ἀνυπόδητος (talk) 13:55, 2 July 2009 (UTC)

Support the merge and encourage Itub to perform it (as he is more qualified here than I). Materialscientist (talk) 01:38, 5 August 2009 (UTC)

Support the merge. It's the same thing and could be mentioned/described in a "Uses" section. MrBell ^(talk) 16:17, 5 August 2009 (UTC)

Merged under the assumption that SLS is always used as a mixture of alkyl sulfates, not only in medicine. I am not 100% sure about SLS-PAGE, though. --ἀνυπόδητος (talk) 10:15, 6 August 2009 (UTC)