Scientists unboil boiled eggs

A team of chemists have figured out how to unboil egg whites which could ultimately reduce costs for cancer treatments, food production and other segments of the 160 billion dollars global biotechnology industry.

The research was conducted by University Of California (UCI) and Australian chemists.

Gregory Weiss, UCI professor of chemistry and molecular biology and biochemistry, said that they have invented a way to unboil a hen egg and in their paper, they describe a device for pulling apart tangled proteins and allowing them to refold. They start with egg whites boiled for 20 minutes at 90 degrees Celsius and return a key protein in the egg to working order.

Weiss continued that it is not so much that they are interested in processing the eggs and that's just demonstrating how powerful this process is but the real problem is there are lots of cases of gummy proteins that one spend way too much time scraping off your test tubes and one want some means of recovering that material.

Weiss and his colleagues added a urea substance that chews away at the whites, liquefying the solid material to re-create a clear protein known as lysozyme once an egg has been boiled and then employ a vortex fluid device, a high-powered machine designed by Professor Colin Raston's laboratory at South Australia's Flinders University.

Shear stress within thin, microfluidic films is applied to those tiny pieces, forcing them back into untangled, proper form.

The study is published in the journal ChemBioChem.