Recent advances of using personal glucose meter as a biosensor readout for non-glucose targets.

BACKGROUND: Personal glucose meter (PGM) has become the most successful biosensor in past decades due to its advantages of small size, convenient operation, and low cost. To take advantage of many years of research and development of PGMs, new signal transduction methods has been developed to expand the PGM from simple monitoring blood glucose to detection of numerous non-glucose targets. OBJECTIVES: This review summarizes recent advance of PGM-based biosensors for non-glucose targets including signal transduction, signal amplification and target molecule recognition and analysis. Current challenges and future directions are also discussed. CONCLUSION: PGM can be used as biosensor readout to detect various non-glucose targets from metal ion, small molecule to protein and even living organisms such as bacteria and other pathogens by using different signal transduction elements such as invertase and amylase, and different signal amplification methods such as nanomaterials, nucleic acid reaction, liposome encapsulation, hydrogel trapping, DNAzyme amplification and biotin-streptavidin reaction.