A personal glucose meter-utilized strategy for portable and label-free detection of hydrogen peroxide.

ABSTRACT

Rapid and precise detection of hydrogen peroxide (H2O2) holds great significance since it is linked to numerous physiological and inorganic catalytic processes. We herein developed a label-free and washing-free strategy to detect H2O2 by employing a hand-held personal glucose meter (PGM) as a signal readout device. By focusing on the fact that the reduced redox mediator ([Fe(CN)6]4-) itself is responsible for the final PGM signal, we developed a new PGM-based strategy to detect H2O2 by utilizing the target H2O2-mediated oxidation of [Fe(CN)6]4- to [Fe(CN)6]3- in the presence of horseradish peroxidase (HRP) and monitoring the reduced PGM signal in response to the target amount. Based on this straightforward and facile design principle, H2O2 was successfully determined down to 3.63 µM with high specificity against various non-target molecules. We further demonstrated that this strategy could be expanded to identify another model target choline by detecting H2O2 produced through its oxidation promoted by choline oxidase. Moreover, we verified its practical applicability by reliably determining extracellular H2O2 released from the breast cancer cell line, MDA-MB-231. This work could evolve into versatile PGM-based platform technology to identify various non-glucose target molecules by employing their corresponding oxidase enzymes, greatly advancing the portable biosensing technologies.