This work addresses the ubiquitous presence of organic contaminants at inorganic solid surfaces and the improvement of XPS analysis selectivity to cope with it. The reliability of XPS data was evaluated by correlations between spectral data incorporating a large amount of results obtained with different XPS spectrometers on 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.
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.