Scientists find how to unboil eggs

Scientists have invented a way to unboil a hen egg and claim that the new method could dramatically slash costs for cancer treatments and speed up biotechnology research related to proteins.
Researchers from University of California, Irvine and Australian chemists figured out how to unboil egg whites.
"Yes, we have invented a way to unboil a hen egg," said Gregory Weiss, UCI professor of chemistry and molecular biology & biochemistry.
"In our paper, we describe a device for pulling apart tangled proteins and allowing them to refold. We start with egg whites boiled for 20 minutes at 90 degrees Celsius and return a key protein in the egg to working order," Weiss said.

To re-create a clear protein known as lysozyme once an egg has been boiled, Weiss and his colleagues add a urea substance that chews away at the whites, liquefying the solid material.
That's half the process; at the molecular level, protein bits are still balled up into unusable masses.

The scientists 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.
Weiss said like many researchers, he has struggled to efficiently produce or recycle valuable molecular proteins that have a wide range of applications but which frequently 'misfold' into structurally incorrect shapes when they are formed, rendering them useless.

"It's not so much that we're interested in processing the eggs; that's just demonstrating how powerful this process is," Weiss said.
"The real problem is there are lots of cases of gummy proteins that you spend way too much time scraping off your test tubes, and you want some means of recovering that material," he said.
Older methods are expensive and time-consuming but the new process takes minutes, speeding things up by a factor of thousands.
"This method could transform industrial and research production of proteins," the researchers wrote in the study published in the journal ChemBioChem.
For example, pharmaceutical companies currently create cancer antibodies in expensive hamster ovary cells that do not often misfold proteins.

The ability to quickly and cheaply re-form common proteins from yeast or E coli bacteria could potentially streamline protein manufacturing and make cancer treatments more affordable, researchers said.