Scientists have found a way to ‘unboil’ eggs – and it could be a life-saver

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This article titled “Scientists have found a way to ‘unboil’ eggs – and it could be a life-saver” was written by Homa Khaleeli, for The Guardian on Tuesday 27th January 2015 14.36 UTC

It sounds like the breakthrough that no one was asking for: scientists have announced they have managed to “unboil” an egg. In a disgusting-sounding experiment that you probably shouldn’t try at home, an international team of researchers have used urea, one of the main components of urine, and a “vortex fluid device” to uncook a hen’s egg.

They believe the findings could dramatically reduce costs in processes as far apart as cheese manufacturing and cancer research.

The researchers boiled an egg for 20 minutes, before focusing on returning one protein in the egg white to its previous state. The idea was to combat the difficulties that arise when proteins “misfold” while they are forming, forcing scientists to use time-consuming methods to “recycle” misfolded proteins.

“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,” says Gregory Weiss, professor of chemistry and molecular biology and biochemistry at the University of California Irvin. “In our paper, we describe a device for pulling apart tangled proteins and allowing them to refold.”

Adding a urea substance to the egg turned it from a solid, cooked white back into a liquid. But this still left the proteins unusuably tangled up until they were put into a vortex fluid device, where they were spun and gently pulled apart until they refolded into their proper structure.

“They’re getting stretched apart, and they snap back,” says Weiss. “Sometimes they snap back into their natural shapes.”

Previously, “recycling” proteins could take four days because scientists would have to use the equivalent of dialysis at the molecular level, but the boiled egg process took minutes.

Now Weiss and his colleagues hope their method – while not resulting in an appetising egg – can at least be applied to cheaper proteins such as yeast or E coli bacteria, allowing antibodies to be produced much more quickly.

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Scientists have found a way to ‘unboil’ eggs – and it could be a life-saver