Organic adlayer on inorganic materials: XPS analysis selectivity to cope with adventitious contamination

[Display omitted] •A clean stainless steel surface picks organic contaminants faster in an XPS spectrometer than in ambient air.•Sterilizing stainless steel by autoclaving makes the surface less prone to organic contamination.•The selectivity of XPS analysis is improved so that a discrimination can be made between adventitious contaminants and adsorbed biomacromolecules.•A discrimination can also be made between oxygen from an organic adlayer and oxygen from an inorganic substrate.•The O 1s component above 532.0eV is due to organic compounds rather than adsorbed water. This work addresses the ubiquitous presence of organic contaminants at inorganic solid surfaces and the improvement of XPS analysis selectivity to cope with it. Water contact angle measurements showed that the adsorption of organic contaminants occurs readily in ambient air, and faster and more extensively under high vacuum. It is stronger on stainless steel (SS) compared to silica and is significantly reduced when SS is sterilized by autoclaving. The reliability of XPS data was evaluated (selectivity, precision, accuracy) by correlations between spectral data incorporating a large amount of results obtained with different XPS spectrometers on SS and glass samples cleaned in different ways and conditioned with several biomacromolecules. The methodology used allows a discrimination to be made between contaminants and deliberately adsorbed biomacromolecules, and offers perspectives for tracking the source of contamination. Furthermore, a discrimination can be made between oxygen from the organic adlayer and oxygen from the substrate, and the O 1s component above 532.0eV observed for SS is shown to be due to organic contaminants rather than adsorbed water. This approach offers new perspectives to examine the interactions (displacement or not) between contaminants and compounds of interest, e.g. proteins, at the stage of the adsorption process.