专门的癌症治疗有可能利用谷氨酰胺依赖性来提高患者的生存率。能够跟踪患者对治疗反应的谷氨酰胺诊断将使个性化治疗剂量成为可能，从而优化治疗成功与危险副作用之间的权衡。目前的临床谷氨酰胺测试需要复杂且昂贵的实验室测试，这些测试无法在频繁、个性化的基础上广泛使用。为了满足低成本、便携式谷氨酰胺诊断的需求，这项工作设计了一种无细胞谷氨酰胺生物传感器，以克服先前报道的研究中明显的检测背景和信噪比限制。这项工作的结果最终导致了一种可稳定保存的纸基比色谷氨酰胺测试的开发，该测试具有高信号强度和高信号背景比，可显着提高信号分辨率。虽然工程谷氨酰胺测试是改善癌症和其他健康状况管理的重要进展，但这项工作也扩展了有前景的无细胞生物传感平台的检测开发领域，可以促进多种靶标的低成本检测具有较高临床价值的分子。

Specialized cancer treatments have the potential to exploit glutamine dependence to increase patient survival rates. Glutamine diagnostics capable of tracking a patient's response to treatment would enable a personalized treatment dosage to optimize the tradeoff between treatment success and dangerous side effects. Current clinical glutamine testing requires sophisticated and expensive lab-based tests, which are not broadly available on a frequent, individualized basis. To address the need for a low-cost, portable glutamine diagnostic, this work engineers a cell-free glutamine biosensor to overcome assay background and signal-to-noise limitations evident in previously reported studies. The findings from this work culminate in the development of a shelf-stable, paper-based, colorimetric glutamine test with a high signal strength and a high signal-to-background ratio for dramatically improved signal resolution. While the engineered glutamine test is important progress towards improving the management of cancer and other health conditions, this work also expands the assay development field of the promising cell-free biosensing platform, which can facilitate the low-cost detection of a broad variety of target molecules with high clinical value.