Depth profiling of the elemental surface composition of the oral microorganism S. salivarius HB and fibrillar mutants by X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy.

X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) on microbial cell surfaces requires freeze-drying of cells, and as a result, the cell surface appendages flatten out on the cell surface and form a collapsed fibrillar mass. At present, it is unclear how the density, length and composition of these fibrils influence the elemental surface composition as probed by XPS. The sampling depth of XPS can be varied by changing the electron take-off angle. In this article, we made a depth profiling of the collapsed fibrillar mass of Streptococcus salivarius HB and fibril-deficient mutants by angle-dependent XPS. Methylamine tungstate negative staining and ruthenium red staining followed by sectioning revealed distinct classes of fibrils with various lengths on each of the strains. Interpretation of the angle dependence of the oxygen/carbon (O/C) and phosphorus/carbon (P/C) surface concentration ratios of these strains was difficult. However, the angle dependence of the nitrogen/carbon (N/C) surface concentration ratio could be fully interpreted: N/C did not vary with sampling depth on a bald strain, S. salivarius HBC12 and on S. salivarius HB7, a strain with a dense array of fibrils of uniform length. N/C decreased with sampling depth in case of a sparsely fibrillated strain, S. salivarius HBV51 and eventually reached the value observed for the bald strain, HBC12. A high N/C at small sampling depth was observed for S. salivarius HB with protruding, protein rich fibrils. We conclude that elemental depth profiling of microbial cell surfaces by XPS can be interpreted to coincide with structural and biochemical information on the cell surface as obtained by electron microscopy and can therefore be considered as a useful technique to study structural features of cell surfaces in combination with electron microscopy.