Using the Personal Glucose Meter to Quantify a Wide Range of Targets

Using the personal glucose meter for convenient quantification of wide range of targets

Tian Lan, Yu Xiang and Yi LU

Abstract:

Convenient, low-cost and quantitative detection of broad range of targets has the great potential to revolutionize today's practice for medical and environmental monitoring. Despite years of research, very few such devices have been commercialized at a large scale. Today's personal glucose meter (PGM) is the culmination of decades of R&D and commercialization efforts aimed to satisfy the daily need of millions of diabetes patients worldwide to monitor their blood glucose levels. The PGM is the almost the ideal sensing platform, which offers convenience, low-cost and quantitative, except it only quantifies one target, glucose.

Instead of designing a new platform that can be time consuming and costly, we have developed an innovative method that adapts the widely available PGM for quantifying a wide range of targets, including metal ions, small molecules, proteins and nucleic acid sequences. An enzyme invertase, which hydrolyzes sucrose into glucose, is conjugated to recognition molecules, such as aptamers, DNAzymes, antibodies and DNA, and relays the non-glucose target binding events to the presence and concentration of glucose, which can be measured using PGM. Using this approach, we have demonstrated quantification of metal ions using DNAzymes, small molecules using aptamers and antibodies, various protein markers using antibodies, and viral DNA fragments using complementary DNA as shown in Table-1.

In conclusion, we have demonstrated an innovative way of leveraging the existing PGM hardware for quantification of non-glucose target using different recognition molecules. The technology can be used to develop new sensing platform using the technologies developed for the PGM over the last decades.